Steel Gunner 1 & 2

Wrapping up my series of light-gun articles for this month, I’m returning to the roots of this blog: Mecha. And to do that, I’m highlighting a long-forgotten Namco arcade shooter: Steel Gunner.

In the mid-to-late ’90s, Namco became famous for its wildly successful Time Crisis series. But a few years earlier, back in the early ’90s, the company experimented with a futuristic, mecha-flavored rail shooter that has since slipped into obscurity: Steel Gunner.

Steel Gunner features a buddy-cop storyline set in a near-future city where the protagonists don power armor to combat terrorist threats. The series produced two games before vanishing entirely, for reasons that remain unclear. My memories of the story are fuzzy, but the first game involved rescuing kidnapped scientists from terrorists wielding a giant “Metal Gear–style” robot, while Steel Gunner 2 had the heroes facing off against what I can only describe as a kind of robot wizard as the big bad.

To be honest, both games were classic arcade coin-guzzlers; punishing, flashy, and designed to drain your pockets as quickly as possible. But despite that, what made Steel Gunner stick in my mind was its mechanical design, especially the police power armor worn by the protagonists. The suits are peak late-’80s mecha aesthetics, and it still surprises me that Namco never revisited or reused these designs in later titles.

You’d think Bandai Namco might eventually re-release Steel Gunner as part of their classic arcade library if only to make some quick bucks. But decades later, it remains untouched. It makes me wonder whether licensing issues or internal red tape have buried this series for good.

While not a direct successor, Namco’s Lucky & Wild carries a bit of that same buddy-cop energy, and is worth trying if you’re curious about earlier Namco shooter experiments.