Ikari Warriors

Rambo meets Front Line in this popular classic that spawned several similar games, like Heavy Barrel, Time Soldiers, and Guerrilla War. The game could either be played by a single player or by two players simultaneously. The goal was to reach the village of Ikari. Preventing the player from reaching the village were a slew of enemies like soldiers, tanks, helicopters, super tanks, and the terribly annoying "kamikaze soldiers" that walked right up to you and blew themselves and you up. Each soldier was equipped with a different weapon like a semi-automatic machine gun, an automatic machine gun, grenades, and super grenades. To assist the players in their struggle were a number of power-ups that extended the players shots, allowed the player to shoot over obstacles, and super grenades. And since the player's munitions were depletable, additional ammo/grenades had to be picked up along the way. The players could also drive tanks and do neat things like run over the enemy soldiers.

HINT: When driving a tank, try to avoid upgrading from cannonballs to missiles. Cannonballs explode as supergrenades making it easier to hit gates and squadrons of men. Missiles, unfortunately, only take out one obstacle and will explode upon reaching their maximum range, which is rarely where you'd like the explosions to be.

TRICK: There are times when incoming missile triggers are impossible to avoid in the tank. A bug in the machine maximizes the number of explosions that can be onscreen at one time. When you MUST run over a trigger, fire off three shots rapidly timed to explode when the missile lands. With luck, the computer will be unable to generate the explosion and you and your tank can continue.

This was such a popular game that it was ported to many of the home console systems and personal computers of the time. Unfortunately, since these systems didn't have rotational joysticks available for them, they were IMHO inferior.

The Colonel Cook character in the game was added for the US version as a nod toward one of the partners of Tradewest, Leland Cook. Cook took a Texas A and M Corps Colonel's hat with him to Japan, and the character was designed with that hat.

The dedicated game housings were built by Dynamo, a third-party manufacturer that created the popular "cut-corner" cabinet. These enclosures became popular conversion cabinets for many later JAMMA games. Ikari Warriors was also released as a JAMMA conversion kit later on.

Ikari Warriors was manufactured by Tradewest which licensed the game from SNK.

The dedicated boardset has a 22/44-pin edge connector that uses the SNK pinout while the conversion kit PCB uses the JAMMA standard pinout. Both have two 13-pin connectors on the board that connect via cables to the LS-30 rotary joysticks on the control panel.