Sunset Riders

What it was

Every stage opens on a wanted poster: a face, a name and a price. Then you ride out and collect. Sunset Riders is Konami's Wild West run and gun, starring four bounty hunters, Steve and Billy with revolvers, Bob with a rifle and Cormano with a double-barrelled shotgun, working through a gang of outlaws one boss at a time.

It plays like Konami's Contra moved onto a Western backlot, with a lighter tone. You run, jump between upper and lower floors, slide under shots and fire as you go. The eight stages mix five on foot, two on horseback and one on a moving train, with a bonus shooting gallery after the second and fifth. A gold sheriff's badge gives you rapid fire and a silver one a second gun, and you can hold both at once. Rocks, barrels and torches hang ready to drop on the enemies below, and lit dynamite has to be thrown back before it goes off. One hit costs a life and every power-up you were carrying.

Where it sits in history

Sunset Riders began in arcades in 1991, in two-player and four-player cabinets. In Japan, Game Machine's 15 December 1991 issue listed it as the month's third most successful table arcade unit. Konami then reprogrammed it for home consoles, the Mega Drive in 1992 and the SNES in 1993, and released both only in North America and Europe.

The two ports went separate ways. The Mega Drive version kept only Billy and Cormano and four of the eight bosses. The SNES version stayed much closer to the arcade and added subtitles to the voiced scenes, but it was cleaned up for Nintendo: the barfly and the saloon dancers dress more modestly, the Native American enemies of stage six became ordinary outlaws, and the dynamite-throwing women became men.

Reviewers liked it. Super Play gave the SNES version 87 per cent, and Nintendo Life later gave it eight out of ten. In June 2020 Hamster re-released the arcade original in its Arcade Archives series.

How it plays today

It still looks and sounds terrific. The animation is lively, the bosses are big personalities, and the music has the right swagger for a cartoon Western. Stages are short and varied, and the horseback and train sections break up the run and gun rhythm nicely.

One-hit deaths and the loss of your power-ups make it tougher than the bright colours suggest, and once you know it, a full run is brief. The SNES edits stand out if you know the arcade game, but they change how it looks more than how it plays. For the uncut version, the Arcade Archives release is the one to get; the SNES cartridge remains an excellent home version on its own terms.

Compared with

• Contra III: The Alien Wars: Konami's other great SNES run and gun, harder and heavier, set in a war instead of a Western.
• Wild Guns: Natsume's Western shooter on the SNES, played as a shooting gallery rather than a side-scroller.
• Gun.Smoke: Capcom's scrolling Western on the NES, with a bounty hunter and wanted posters of its own.

Why it matters

Sunset Riders shows you the reward before you earn it. Each stage opens on a wanted poster: the outlaw's face, the name, the bounty. Then you spend the stage fighting towards that face.

Kent Berridge and Terry Robinson's work shows dopamine is more about wanting than liking: the pull towards a reward, not the pleasure of having it. A wanted poster is wanting made visible. It gives the next few minutes a target, and the target pulls harder the closer the boss gets. The arcade game added a twist when friends played together: whoever dealt the most damage to the boss took the whole bounty. Everyone cooperates through the stage, then scrambles for the prize at the end, and the scramble is half the fun. It is a neat picture of how we chase things. Being paid is over in a second. The wanting carried us the whole way there.

Read: Wanting, not liking: what dopamine really does when you play →

1. Berridge, K. C., & Robinson, T. E. (1998). What is the role of dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive salience? Brain Research Reviews, 28(3), 309-369. doi:10.1016/S0165-0173(98)00019-8