Contra or The Toughest Game to Beat

Another arcade classic from the year 1987 that I’d like to bring to your attention (yes, the 80’s are awesome) has to do with fallen meteorites, alien invasions, and marines from an elite unit sent to blow everything up. Does that ring any bells? I bet it probably does and the reason is that this fantastic run and gun game known as “Contra” -and its sequels- were heavily influenced by the very successful action and sci-fi movies of the time, namely Predator, Rambo and Aliens.

Another great game featuring two player simultaneous gameplay, which I’d like to remind you, was something extremely rare to be found in video games at that time. And let’s face it, as good as the single player experience might be, you haven’t really played Contra until you start a multiplayer game and within a couple minutes find yourselves yelling at each other for lagging behind or taking a powerup that the other really needed. Coordination and cooperation is a must if you want to get to the last levels, but you can still have fun messing around with your partner by not letting him scroll onward and such.

You get to be Bill or Lance, the two commando-type and fearless protagonists who are trying to prevent a plot to invade Earth by an alien army called Red falcon. Or something like that. You just shoot everything in sight, jump around avoiding enemy fire and try to collect better weapons and powerups like a flamethrower, a laser gun or a machine gun. There are eight stages in total, six side-scrolling and two behind-the-back, so get going and blow those aliens up!

Play Contra online in your browser with this Java Nes simulator (yes, it supports 2 player shenanigans!) and take a couple minutes to read this nice review of the Contra NES game.



Contra's Title (source Moby Games)
The English title of Contra comes from the way the title is phonetically displayed in Japanese, using the characters "Kon To Ra". The literal meaning behind these characters seems unimportant: "kon" means "spirit", "to" means "battle" and "ra", means some sort of cloth. Literally this would translate to something similar to "Battle Spirit Cloth". An alternate source of translation claims that the title translated is "Soul Big Dipper Gauze".

Regardless of the literal meaning, the title seems to have been written as a "gikun". What that means is that the phonetics of the title are more important than the actual meaning itself.

It has been suggested by some that the intent behind the name is even more complicated than that. "Kon To Ra" purposely chosen to sound like "Contra", a term popularly used to describe armed guerrilla forces in Central America during the 1980s.