Mazer

“Earth’s Last Hope of Breaking Semag Rule.”

“You are equipped with a bio-enhancer which increases your normal abilities.”
North American front cover.

To start this article off with something of a confession: I hate mazes. I reckon it just comes down to not having the aptitude for navigation-driven puzzles, as I often find myself completely and hopelessly lost in even the most simply constructed of them. I’m the kind of player who brings up my map every thirty seconds in a video game just to triple-check my bearings, to make absolutely sure that I’m always headed in the right direction — that I haven’t turned myself around without noticing, even in the most streamlined of level designs. Take my precious map away from me, and I’m as lost as a lost cause, doomed to wander in circles eternally. (Or until I decide to give up on the game in question. Whichever comes first.) And don’t even get me started on grid-based labyrinths from the pre-3D era of gaming; where developers attempted to trick players with the illusion of perspective, and dropped them into monochrome dungeons technically incapable of presenting the most basic of signposting or wall variation. Excuse me if I don’t wanna break out the graph paper and stop to draw in the lines every time I press my D-pad, all so that I can realize five minutes later that I forgot to account for a single tile which renders my entire map useless. Maybe to you that sounds like a great way to spend your Saturday afternoon, but it just ain’t for me. So, here we are presented with a 3DO game that literally has the word “maze” in its title, and I’m sat here dreading the absolute worst. And then it turns out, there’s not a single maze to be seen in it: It’s actually just an isometric arcade shooter! Guess I didn’t really need to include that whole diatribe about how lousy I am at solving mazes after all, huh?

1995’s Mazer on the 3DO represents more than just an example of misinterpretable titling, though: It marks the end of a bona fide gaming dynasty — the moment in which an industry icon made a final attempt at maintaining their relevance, only to fail spectacularly. It is the last title to be developed in-house by the studio American Laser Games, who built their empire on a foundation of LaserDisc-driven arcade shooters. But by the time they realized that their typical format was no longer commercially viable, it was already too late for them to pivot to more traditional genre fare. Mazer stands as the monument to that failure: A critically reviled release on a home console that never proved financially tenable for any of the companies who chose to support it. Factor in scrapped plans / fruitless investments in bringing the title to arcades, and you’ve got the recipe for the company’s eventual bankruptcy. In other words, even if Mazer had turned out to be amazing, it still wouldn’t have done American Laser Games any good. But perhaps that’s the problem here: Maybe Mazer‘s reputation is just too tied up in the downfall of its developer, and folk have been unfairly writing it off ever since? There’s the odd chance we’ve all been overlooking a hidden gem here — associating the title with the sorry state of its creators, and not giving the game its proper consideration. That sounds like a case for the Bad Game Hall of Fame; where we endeavor to judge games on their own merits, and give them a fair shake when no one else will! (Unless they have mazes in them: I’m content to just keep writing those ones off.)

Of course, we’ll still provide a recap of American Laser Games’ roughly five-year reign as kings of the LaserDisc arcade, so that we can better understand the circumstances that led to Mazer‘s production. That means we get to cover the likes of Mad Dog McCree and Fast Draw Showdown, which I’m excited to finally have an excuse to talk about here. Honestly, I’ll find any reason I can to write about western-themed games on this site; and by golly, did ALG sure love drawing from the dusty well of the Old West. After we get all that out of my system, we’ll move on to properly reviewing Mazer, and decide whether or not it’s truly as wretched as its reputation makes out. From there, we’ll measure the game’s role in the downfall of its developers, and determine if the studio could have otherwise avoided [or at least postponed] their seemingly inevitable collapse. Perhaps there’s an alternate timeline in which American Laser Games continues to produce FMV games into the present day — where LaserDisc still rules supreme over the home video formats, cowboys are still considered the epitome of cool, and the Semag-Resal Empire leaves our pitiful planet alone in their campaign of galactic conquest. But enough for now about wishful thinking and what could’ve been: It’s high time we travel back to the past, and explore the disc-based dead end that is Mazer.

“Azator Disdains the Use of Guns, Deeming Them Unmanly.”

“It’s in the air: It’s an ill wind that
blows no good.”
Promotional flyer for Mad Dog McCree.

Meet Robert Grebe: A Vietnam veteran turned enterprising businessman, who saw the potential in early disc-based video formats and the opportunity to turn a profit with them. This led to his establishing the company ‘ICAT’ (Institute for Combat Arms and Tactics) in 1988, in order to produce and market the ‘Apogee Interactive Video’ system — a line of virtual training simulators for use by police and army personnel.^[1] Similar systems already existed within the market – branded as “Shoot / No Shoot” devices – but were comparatively primitive to what the Apogee system offered: A range of simulated scenarios shot on film [and sold on individual discs], which reacted dynamically depending on when and where the user fired their weapon (conversions of decommissioned .357 magnums and 12 gauge shotguns, made to project lasers instead of firing bullets); resulting in the actors made to portray armed criminals responding differently to being shot in their head, torso, arms, or legs. With this implementation, the first shot fired might not immediately end an encounter, as the scene might continue to play out with an injured target — capable of presenting further threat until they’re either disarmed or dead. Accomplishing this feat took Robert Grebe learning the trades of filmmaking and software design: Hiring on actors and cameramen, writing and storyboarding for all the branching paths, and shooting for “hundreds of hours” to produce scenarios that ran just two or three minutes in length; all before bringing that footage into a utility where they’d keyframe the target areas, instructing their video playback device on what timecodes it’d need to cut to, and calibrating the hardware to precisely register a user’s shots. Obviously, Robert wasn’t doing all this production work on his own, but he certainly appeared to be more hands-on in the process than your typical CEO.

Ignoring how simulations like ICAT’s offerings reinforce a dangerous “shoot to kill” mentality among cops, it can’t be said that the technology on display wasn’t on the cutting edge: Previous systems weren’t capable of accounting for location damage, or able to seamlessly cue up multiple different outcomes to an encounter. For better or for worse, the Apogee system presented officers with the most realistic virtual simulations on the market, and was adapted by police departments across several states. (A 1989 article on the subject mentions adoption by precincts in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nevada.^[1b]) By the end of the decade, ICAT had an award consideration by the British government under their belt, as well as inquiries from multiple countries interested in adapting / localizing the system for their own law enforcement. Clearly, the Apogee system had proven a success, and its $30,000 dollar price tag per unit (not counting the separately sold $2,000 scenario disks) wasn’t considered too steep by the police departments who purchased it. Your taxpayer money at work, folks! The price point did present a bit of a dilemma, though: It kept the product confined to the government sector, and completely unaffordable to a potentially lucrative consumer market. And you’d better believe that there was a demand for it, which Robert was acutely aware of. As Patricia O’Connor for the Albuquerque Journal would report: “Almost every time [Robert] gives a demonstration, someone asks if he or she can buy an Apogee system for their den.” At the same time, Grebe was hesitant to scale down the Apogee system for hobby-grade manufacture, likely fearing that they’d devalue their flagship product line in doing so. If Robert wanted to break into the consumer market, he was gonna have to develop a new concept altogether for it — distance it completely from ICAT’s continuing operations. As such, when folk asked him what his plans for the future were, he’d simply tell them that he’d “started working on a [new] interactive video system just for fun.”

A brief tangent before we proceed: Robert’s company happened to share an office building with a business by the name of ‘American Ingenuity’ — a furniture design and manufacture business targeting products toward preschool-aged children.^[1c] What’s notable about it (besides the fact it operated just a few doors down from a space stocked with firearms) is that it was founded and operated by Robert’s wife, Patricia Grebe. The two had first met on a flight in February 1987, while both were already in the early planning stages for their own respective enterprises. By June 1988, the pair would be wed, indicating just how quickly they had hit it off with one another. Clearly, Robert and Patricia both respected each other’s business acumen, and saw fit to involve each other in the operations of their companies: Robert would briefly be in charge of running American Ingenuity for a two-month period, while Patricia was out of commission recovering from a surgery. For her part, Patricia put Robert in touch with her brother – Randal Lindsay – who’d serve as the “computer-whiz” responsible for actually designing / implementing the technical aspects of the Apogee system. Not only that, but Patricia would go on to assume a role as ‘VP of Marketing’ for Robert’s soon-to-debut video game venture, and eventually establish a spin-off software house of her own. But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here: We’ve still gotta cover that “new interactive video system” Robert was working on, and how it wound up completely altering the trajectory of his career.

“Save the humans and destroy the aliens and their machines.”
Robert Grebe, photographed for the Albuquerque Journal.^[2]

In case you hadn’t already guessed, this is where American Laser Games enters into the picture: Robert Grebe’s new company, established in order to differentiate his consumer entertainment products from his contract work for law enforcement. (ICAT would continue to operate through to 1991 — potentially into ’92 or beyond.)^[3] Their first order of business was to find a way to pare down the Apogee hardware in order to make these consumer-grade systems more accessible and affordable; seeing as their previous installations necessitated film projectors and 10′ by 7’5″ foot-tall matte screens, as well as full computer setups manned by a dedicated technician to pair. The most economical iteration here would be cramming all that machinery into the confines of an arcade cabinet, and effectively automating the role of the technician with conventional coin-op game logic. To this end, ALG’s cabinets would boast either 50″ or 33” inch CRT monitors in place of the projector screens, and house models of Amiga 500 computers; which were plenty capable of keeping track of a player’s lives and credits, as well as instructing an accompanying LaserDisc player to cue up the clips it’d need to play back at a moment’s notice. Where the revised hardware seemed to fall short, though, was in keeping track of more than one moving hitbox on the screen at a time, which meant that screens populated by more than one active target area were seemingly no longer possible (or at the very least, far more difficult to implement).** This would reduce the potential complexity / number of branching paths they’d have to account for when it came to plotting out their action scenes — which, come to think of it, might’ve actually helped to streamline their production process? It probably saved them a ton of time [and money] not having to film six different outcomes for each of an actor’s individual body parts getting shot in every encounter.

Of course, American Laser Games couldn’t just re-use the footage from their police training scenarios and expect it to get approved for the arcade market. (Something tells me that scenes where players intervene in sexual assaults might not fly in an environment populated largely by children.) Plus, Robert was likely still looking to differentiate ALG’s operations from ICAT’s at this point, so theming their debut game around policing was a no-go. But what other sort of setting would resonate with the arcade audience; or, perhaps more importantly, make for a relatively cheap production choice? Luckily, Robert wouldn’t have to look too far for inspiration: With ALG’s offices being situated in Albuquerque, New Mexico, they were less than an hour’s drive away from the ‘J.W. Eaves Movie Ranch’ — the ideal setting for an Old West-inspired film shoot. And with that primo location in mind, the plans were quickly drawn up for the game that would become Mad Dog McCree: A lightgun shooter in which the player assumes the role of an unnamed gunslinger, who endeavors to save a town from the clutches of the title’s eponymous outlaw and his gang. With a six-shooter in hand, it falls on our mysterious stranger to shoot his way through a number of choreographed encounters, where enemies attack you one at a time giving you precious few seconds to outdraw them. The challenge is in reacting to where the targets appear from on the screen, and quickly determining if they’re actually friend or foe; since there are also unarmed civilians to account for, who will cost you a life for accidentally shooting just the same as if you let yourself get hit. There are also instances where you have to take out your targets before they gun down innocent bystanders, who provide you vital clues to solving a handful of puzzles in later segments of the game. (For example: Saving a prospector will reward you with the knowledge of how to successfully disarm a booby trap set up outside Mad Dog’s hideout.)

In actual execution, many of the shootouts are decidedly unfair: Enemies are often barely visible popping out of cover in the far corners of the screen, while others simply provide insufficient time for you to effectively react [without already knowing how the scripted scenes are meant to play out]. There’s also the issue of not being able to take out your targets until the game is ready for you; where you might know exactly who and where you’ll need to shoot, but can’t actually register a successful hit until the program draws its invisible hitbox around them. This becomes especially frustrating in scenes where you’re tasked with gunning down multiple outlaws occupying the screen at the same time as one another, but are only allowed to do so in a predetermined order / when they take their individual turns drawing their weapons on you. It’s design decisions (perhaps more accurately, technical restrictions) like this which immediately served to highlight the limitations of the system — which brought into focus the inflexibility of working with full-motion video, to where even the casual player could discern what was hamstringing their gameplay experience. And yet, there’s just something about Mad Dog McCree that makes you wanna forgive all that — which compels you to put its flaws to the side, and just appreciate it for what it is. Perhaps it’s the magic of seeing these elaborate western set pieces presented on film, and feeling like you’re a part of the production? Maybe it’s the morbid satisfaction that comes from pulling the trigger on your plastic gun and watching a real person playing dead on the screen? Or it’s possible that the game is just so gloriously cheesy – awkwardly paced and overacted as can be – that you simply get invested in wanting to see how every clumsy cutscene plays out.

I know I can’t dwell too long on Mad Dog McCree here, and that we’re gonna have to move along sooner rather than later. But I need to stress just how impressive this game was in its time, and why it proved such a success for American Laser Games. It might not have been the first video game to leverage LaserDisc footage (predated eight years by Sega’s 1982 arcade title Astron Belt), but it feels like the first where the footage and the gameplay are properly married to each other, and where you really get the sense that you’re the one driving the action. Compare it to the likes of a Badlands or Dragon’s Lair, or any other 80s LaserDisc title where the pressing of a button leads to your animated character performing some elaborately choreographed series of movements that feel completely divorced from your input: By swapping out the traditional buttons for aiming and shooting with a lightgun, your actions are more or less one-to-one with what your gunslinger is doing in the game. Of course, Mad Dog McCree was far from the first lightgun game, either — not even the first to incorporate live-action footage, at that. (See Nintendo’s original 1974 arcade release of Wild Gunman.) But again, it comes down to the matter of the elaborate theming and performances, which bring the gloriously goofy world of the game to life. On top of all that, the game features a range of classic movie stunts; including folk falling off roofs and getting thrown through windows, as well as big explosions with rickety old buildings being reduced to rubble. Honestly, what might’ve been one of the biggest factors in the game’s success was arcade-goers seeing clips of those big booms in the game’s attract mode, and wanting to feel like they were the ones sparking them.

Mad Dog McCree debuted in arcades in late 1990. By February of 1991, American Laser Games had already sold through a hundred of their cabinets, and quickly earned themselves a spot near the top of the list of highest-grossing arcade titles in North America — a position which would stick for nearly the course of a full year.^[4] RePlay Magazine – the industry’s premiere trade publication for coin-op game coverage – would frequently cite Mad Dog as one of the most profitable titles in the market, and run multiple features highlighting the game’s revenues; referring to it as no less than a “collection engine,”^[5] and likely selling operators on ordering hundreds of additional systems from ALG over the course of the year. For a game with a production budget of $125,000 USD (not accounting for system manufacture costs), and with the company selling cabinets at an asking price of $11,500 per unit;^[2b] ALG would make a remarkable profit off the back of its first commercial product — probably toward the latter end of seven figures, owing to estimated coin revenues of roughly $100~250 per day [per cabinet].^[6] Where Robert Grebe had initially projected that Mad Dog McCree would either be “an incredible bomb or one of the biggest things to hit the market in a number of years,”^[2c] it’s safe to say that the game wound up falling into the latter category. In short time, ALG would overtake ICAT in profitability, and lead to Robert fully committing to the more lucrative of his two business ventures. ALG would start producing new arcade titles at a rate of at least one / as many as three per year, with each of them iterating on the same core gameplay that made Mad Dog McCree so successful.

“Johnny Rock, Johnny Rock!
That’s all I hear anymore!”
Promotional flyer for Who Shot Johnny Rock?

Their first follow-up would be 1991’s Who Shot Johnny Rock?: A detective story set in 1930s Chicago, where a Tommy Gun-toting private eye is hired by a femme fatale to solve the murder of her nightclub singer boyfriend — the titular Johnny Rock. In its attempts to differentiate itself / improve on Mad Dog’s formula (aside from the obvious change in setting), it heavily utilizes the element of randomization in order to drive replayability, where the solutions to its small handful of puzzles are determined by draw; as is the identity of Johnny’s murderer, who is selected from a pool of four potential suspects. Near the game’s end, you’ll need to use a series of clues you’ve discovered along the way in order to crack open Johnny’s private safe, which will contain the crucial evidence implicating the person who orchestrated his death and allow you to apprehend them. The game also attempts to introduce a system of economy, where points accumulated over the course of the game are represented as dollars earned; which can be spent in exchange for medical services (in lieu of a set number of lives), as well as to purchase additional ammunition for your fully-automatic firearm (which you can otherwise avoid having to reload). All told, Johnny Rock certainly stands as one of the most unique entries in the American Laser Games catalogue, and probably as one of their best titles to boot: The cast of archetypal film noir characters ham it up to a charmingly ridiculous extent, and the novelty of the 1930s setting really does help the game to stand out in a standard arcade line-up. The only shame of it is the fact that it still relied on Mad Dog’s pre-existing models of lightgun revolvers, rather than providing a proper facsimile of a “Chicago Typewriter” for players to wildly spray across the screen.

1991 brought some bad news to go along with the good for American Laser Games, though: News media had latched onto Mad Dog McCree as an example of how “violent” video games were becoming, as the game was identified as the most “realistic” murder simulator on the market. Never mind the fact that Mad Dog was an entirely bloodless pastiche of well-established western film tropes, or that the game made very clear distinctions between its violent outlaws and innocent bystanders: The fact that players were being made to point plastic firearms at digitized actors was enough to ring the alarm bells, and stir up a moral panic. (Bear in mind that we’re still two years out at this point from the likes of Mortal Kombat and Night Trap getting taken to task by the US Senate, and the games industry being held to age rating standards.) Considering how light-hearted and goofy the game is, it’s wild to read written accounts of its gameplay making it out to be one of the most sadistic shooters ever envisioned. To hear Rebecca Patterson describe it in the pages of the Tampa Bay Times: “The object of Mad Dog is to shoot people: Make them scream and gasp and die or the $1-per-play game is over. The best killers end up in a one-on-one shootout with Mad Dog himself.”^[7] She also goes on to describe her harrowing experience of watching the game in motion, and provides an exaggerated play-by-play of the gruesome action: “His face empty of emotion, 17-year-old Randy Burch squeezed his lips into a thin line and locked his eyes on the target. Arms ramrod straight, he raised the gun and fired. His victim screamed and fell to the ground. He wasn’t dead. The bullet had only grazed his shoulder. Now he was trying to crawl to safety. Randy was merciless. In his black combat boots and military-style haircut, he finished off his prey, a single bullet to the head. […] When Randy shot the cowboy in the shoulder, the cowboy fell but started to crawl away. Had Randy shot him in the head or chest, the cowboy would have died instantly, perhaps accompanied by screams or convulsions to acknowledge points scored.”

A similar report is brought to us by Paul Forhi on behalf of The Washington Post, who saw fit to lump Mad Dog McCree in with another rather tame LaserDisc title, Time Traveler (which does coincidentally star another revolver-toting cowboy): “The new games are fiendish, mean, maybe even a little sick considering how close they come to mimicking actual violence. Which is, after all, the point. Why blow away cartoons, their manufacturers suggest, when you can get that much closer to the sensation of the Real Thing?”^[8] He even sees fit to document another spectator’s report on an observed playthrough, as he stood watching a 17-year-old Ben Kim: “As he plays, a knot of kids gathers to watch, and occasionally offer advice and encouragement: ‘Nice shot!’ ‘You hit him!’ ‘Reload, reload!’ Kim doesn’t seem to hear. He’s pumping the trigger now, fast. In front of him, the TV screen shows a man slumped over in a death pose. Kim calmly and methodically pumps four extra shots into the villain’s face. Already ‘dead,’ the character doesn’t even twitch. The game is over.” Absurd as these snippets may be, they do provide us with a couple of insights into the state of the games industry in the early 90s. For one, newspapers apparently weren’t willing to reimburse their staff for quarters spent at the arcade, since neither of these journalists could apparently afford to actually play the games for themselves! For a more serious take-away: The debate over video games and their desensitizing effect on young minds was nearing a boiling point, as live-action / FMV titles were seen as inching the industry ever closer toward “lifelike” depictions of death and violence. Sooner or later, American Laser Games were going to have to reckon with this intensifying scrutiny; especially as they had just signed a licensing arrangement with Nintendo, in order to bring their titles to the likes of the SNES.^[7b] (More on what became of that deal later.)

Unfortunately, ALG may have overcorrected slightly in their efforts to present themselves as capable of producing family-friendly entertainment. Enter Gallagher’s Gallery: A 1992 release starring the inexplicably popular prop comic Gallagher, whose stage show was (in)famous for segments where he’d destroy household objects with a mallet — almost always ending with smashing a watermelon for his closing act. At some point, Robert Grebe “had caught some of [Gallagher’s] shows and thought that he was pretty funny,” which led to ALG pitching Gallagher on the concept of starring in his own video game.^[9] Unfortunately for everyone involved, the so-called “comedian” accepted, and a film shoot was scheduled to overlap with his touring through Albuquerque. By Robert’s account, Gallagher “turned out to be a total prima donna — just a pain in the ass to work with” (not surprising given other accounts of his behavior); but ALG eventually got the footage they needed, and set about implementing it into their most surreal game to date. Rather than shooting at people, Gallagher’s Gallery sees you shooting a variety of prop objects; including foodstuffs, lights, signage and vehicles. Most of the screens feature either computer-generated or painted backdrops, with the live-action prop elements superimposed in front of them. All the while, Gallagher provides running commentary and instruction on what you’re being made to shoot, as well as appearing on-screen in brief vignettes where he introduces the themed selections of stages — performing a range of “characters” and generally mugging for the camera. The game ends on a final sequence where you’re actually meant to protect watermelons from Gallagher, by shooting the mallet in his hands as he roller skates back and forth between a pair of fruits. Eventually though, his gradually increasing speed becomes impossible to keep up with, and the stage will always end with the man smashing a melon to pieces.

Gallagher’s Gallery is probably the worst of ALG’s FMV games, and not just for the fact that I’ve never found Gallagher to be particularly funny or endearing. It provides the least instruction when it comes to its rules regarding what you are and aren’t meant to shoot; such as in the stage where you’re meant to shoot a variety of road signs behind a moving train, except for the ‘Stop’ sign apparently, as you’re meant to intuit that you yourself are supposed to “stop” shooting. Or take the screen where you’re given fractions of a second to shoot a rubber rat scurrying across a floor, and avoid shooting a similarly fake cat; but the angle and quality of the video are both so poor, it’s nearly impossible to tell the two targets apart, let alone make that necessary determination in the course of a couple milliseconds. Or how about a screen where you’re meant to shoot a dozen or so Christmas lights, where it’s straight-up impossible to discern which ones are apparently lit up and able to be shot? Gallagher’s hacky bits are just the icing on the noxious cake here, as he puts on his most squealish voices in order to play characters including a bratty child and stereotypical western sheriff — taunting and demeaning you every time you fail at one of his poorly-conceptualized challenges. In a retrospective interview conducted twenty-three years later (by friend of the site George J. Horvath for his website ‘Land of Obscusion’), Robert Grebe could only admit that the game’s whole concept was “just a bad idea.”^[9b] Worse yet for ALG, Gallagher’s Gallery represented their first outright flop in the market (“We ended up selling, I think, 10 of those games?”), which must’ve especially stung considering what they likely paid for their celebrity involvement. It was enough to scare ALG away from further experiments in non-violent shooters, and to return to the style of action games that had proven successful for them previously — public outcry over gun violence be damned.

Staying in 1992: American Laser Games launched a direct sequel to Mad Dog McCree, titled Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold. This was largely a return to the original game’s form in terms of gameplay and mechanics, save for one unique twist: Selecting a ‘Guide’ from one of three potential choices near the start will set you on different routes through the game, each with their own unique scenarios and encounters. It also benefits from action scenes with a higher production budget – featuring more in the way of exciting explosions and dynamic camera movement – but can otherwise be said to have been “more of the same” as a sequel to ALG’s first title. Much the same can be said of their last 1992 release Space Pirates: A campy sci-fi romp in which your unnamed ‘Space Ranger’ pursues the villain Captain Talon throughout the galaxy; battling his brigade across a starship colony, four planets, and in deep space onboard your respective spacecrafts. Along the way, you’ll assemble the four components of a ‘Star-Splitter Cannon’ which you need in order to destroy Talon’s ship, before engaging the big bad in a final duel. In terms of production value, Space Pirates is certainly ALG’s most elaborately themed game; though some of the sets are noticeably cheap in their construction (scenes set in a barely-dressed warehouse bring memories of Space Mutiny to mind), and the handful of spaceship battles aren’t especially exciting either. By this point, ALG were already in desperate need of a shake-up to their formula – more than just changing up the theming, as they’d been doing – as they risked burning the market out on their particular brand of shooter. But their bad experience with Gallagher’s Gallery likely left them gun-shy (pardon the pun) — afraid to mix up their familiar formula too drastically. This would inevitably come back to bite them in due time.

By 1993, ICAT no longer seemed to be a going concern for Grebe, and he found himself with a storage unit full of prop guns and costuming from his previous police-themed productions. The time had finally come for American Laser Games to give players a glimpse into the world of law enforcement, in the form of their Crime Patrol series — two titles released back-to-back within 1993. In the first game, you begin as a ‘Rookie’ cop working a beat, and go on to prove yourself by gunning down armed criminals across three scenarios; including an electronics store hold-up, street gang fight, and warehouse heist. From here, you’re chosen to work in the ‘Undercover’ unit, pairing with a new partner who takes you along for a series of three new shooting scenarios; one of which includes a raid on a nightclub with scantily-clad dancing ladies, while another escalates into a car chase following a bust at an airfield. Before long, you graduate to ‘SWAT’ in order to take on bikers gangs and meth cooks, and eventually get selected for ‘Delta Force,’ where the stakes deal in stolen nuclear material and thwarting an assassination attempt. Clearly, the career trajectory illustrated here is as rapid as it is implausible, but that hardly matters when it’s all an excuse for exciting action set pieces. The game’s sequel Crime Patrol 2: Drug Wars ditches the conceit of advancing your career though, and focuses on the role of a DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agent in thwarting a drug lord and his criminal cartel. In lieu of climbing the ranks of law enforcement, you’re simply taken to different locations between sets of stages; beginning in New Mexico, moving into Chicago, pursuing leads on the Mexican border, and finally confronting the head of the cartel in South America. All told, the Crime Patrol duology seems to represent ALG’s most expensive productions in terms of scale and stunt coordination, and probably make for some of the most accessible titles in their catalogue. I still prefer the charms of Mad Dog McCree myself, but I can understand how someone might prefer the grander ambition of the action shlock on display here.

“In Chicago, we shoot first, eat lunch later.” Promotional flyer for Crime Patrol 2:
Drug Wars.

Here’s the thing, though: Despite the more gritty and contemporary setting, the Crime Patrol series still leans into the campier elements of American Laser Games’ typical productions. At the same time you’re being made to ogle exotic dancers in the background of a night club (depending on whether or not an arcade operator enables a certain setting in the service menu), the gunfights are still entirely bloodless, with actors displaying cartoonish overreactions to being shot — unbeholden to the laws of physics. It’s an issue where ALG were clearly looking to escalate the intensity of their action and incorporate more adult-oriented scenarios (as they’d cut their teeth on back in the ICAT days), but were still having to account for kids in attendance at arcades, which limited their willingness to indulge in more graphic content. This was a genuine issue for the company, as their rivals in the arcade were beginning to cater deliberately to bloodthirsty players with titles following Mortal Kombat’s lead, and finding success in doing so. Not only that, but light gun shooters were starting to pick up steam again outside of ALG’s product range; where Konami’s Lethal Enforcers had beaten them to the punch in putting players in the shoes of a police officer, and the sequel Lethal Enforcers II: Gun Fighters almost seemed to take direct aim at ALG’s western titles.*** By utilizing digitized sprites and not binding themselves to FMV footage, these shooters were quickly overtaking ALG’s offerings in terms of depth of gameplay / potential complexity — offering multiple varieties of firearms, and presenting simultaneous targets on-screen for players to react to. And this is all before the likes of Virtua Cop and other 3D titles entered into the market, and quickly dominated the discussion when it came to the cutting-edge of games tech. In just a few short years, Grebe’s company had been demoted from their position as “industry leaders,” and just as quickly relegated to “one-trick pony” status. The returns had begun to diminish on their arcade offerings, and the enterprise seemed to be facing an imminent financial predicament.

This situation wasn’t aided by the fact that American Laser Games’ arrangement with Nintendo had fallen through by this point: In the wake of the US Senate hearings on video game violence, and with Nintendo electing to present themselves as a “family-friendly” alternative to Sega (who they conspired to demonize); their brand image was no longer compatible with the games that ALG were producing, and plans to bring them to the SNES were consequently scrapped. It’s probably just as well, considering that their games would’ve apparently necessitated purchasing “an accompanying CD ROM accessory” for the console (planned to run consumers $200 apiece), which almost certainly would have never actually made it into production in either case. This left ALG in the position of having to support Nintendo’s lagging competition instead, and specifically targeting disc-capable hardware configurations: Sega’s CD add-on for the Genesis, Philips’ CD-i systems, and the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer. (ALG would also release titles on MS-DOS and Macintosh, but these are presumed to have done very little in terms of sales.) 1993 saw the beginning of ALG’s efforts to convert their arcade catalogue to these consoles, which all suffered from low-quality video compression and compromised controls; as the CD-ROM format couldn’t match LaserDisc in terms of fidelity and capacity, and not every system had lightgun peripherals on offer for ALG to utilize. In the case of the 3DO, ALG would have to develop and manufacture their own peripheral for the system: The ‘GameGun,’ modeled closely after the CD-i’s ‘Peacekeeper Revolver’ lightgun — which itself was first launched as part of a bundle with that system’s conversion of Mad Dog McCree.

Given the technical ceiling on potential quality for these ports – which included renditions of every game mentioned so far (except for Gallagher’s Gallery) – it shouldn’t be surprising to hear that games magazines were unkind to them. In example, Edge Magazine’s review of Mad Dog McCree’s 3DO conversion scored as a meager 3 out of 10, with their writer stating as follows: “‘Don’t buy Mad Dog McCree’ seems the logical conclusion. The CinePak video quality is tolerable but once the trickier bits are reached, you’ll be yanking your hair out in big clumps and shouting at the screen. And then you’ll probably stop playing it.”^[10] ‘Major’ Mike Weigand for Electronic Gaming Monthly would get hands on Who Shot Johnny Rock?’s CD-i release, and caution consumers with a 5 out of 10-scoring review: “Johnny Rock suffers inexplicably substandard graphics (the images are so blurry you can’t tell what’s going on at times) and frustrating gameplay. There is plenty of action and the whodunnit aspect of the game is welcome, but the technical aspects hamper the overall product.”^[11] GamePro’s Lawrence Neves (better known to readers as ‘Scary Larry’) may have saw fit to award Crime Patrol’s Sega CD conversion a passing ‘Fun Factor’ grade of 3 out of 5, but the actual contents of their written review are decidedly damning: “As you blast away at bad guys, you progress through the rankings and see the best that sleaze has to offer, like drug busts, machine-gunnin’ mechanics, and strippers. Actually, you don’t see much sleaze because of the poor-quality graphics. The color bleed is so bad that you’re temporarily blinded by explosions. […] With nothing added to pad the mediocrity of yet another shooting title, it’s a crime that his one made it through the line.”^[12] Not helping matters was the fact that most of ALG’s home conversions were scoring ratings of “M for Mature (17+)” from the newly-established ESRB, which were severely limiting their reach in a market recently rocked by government scrutiny.

All that American Laser Games could do was soldier on, and put out a couple more FMV arcade titles in the hopes that it might buy them enough time to plot their next move. And so, they fell back on the theming that had served them best, and which was by far the most economical to produce for: Two more western shooters, both releasing in 1994. The first we’ll address is The Last Bounty Hunter, which unsurprisingly casts you in the role of another gunslinger rolling through a troubled town; taking on bounties on wanted criminals, and gunning down every hapless goon who dares to stand in your way. The game blows its budget early with an impressive raid on an old fort populated by bandits, complete with mounted cavalry backing you up, before dialing everything down to around the level of Mad Dog McCree‘s production. The only thing that really stands to separate Last Bounty Hunter from its predecessors is the ability to pick up weapon upgrades by shooting hotspots in the environment; allowing you to either double your revolver’s ammo count (as if you were carrying guns akimbo), or blast foes away with a double-barrelled shotgun boasting a larger shot spread. Of course, neither of these modifiers are particularly substantive, and it’s clear they’re here to simply provide the bare minimum of mechanical iteration — to try and keep pace with Lethal Enforcers, which by this point was eating ALG’s lunch in the market. If I sound somewhat dismissive of the game as a whole, I don’t mean to: It’s an entirely competent lightgun title, on par with the better entries in the ALG catalogue. It’s just the fact that it doesn’t do anything exciting or markedly different with the studio’s established formula, and embodies the creative stagnation that the company was struggling to overcome.

At first glance, American Laser Games’ second 1994 release Fast Draw Showdown doesn’t appear to do much to meaningfully mix things up either: It’s yet another western shooter, where you play the role of quick draw artist in rounds of deadly competition against other duelists. It does feature another “celebrity” get in the form of Wes Flowers — a competitive fast draw shooter who moonlighted as a gun coach on film productions. Of course, his name wouldn’t really mean much to the casual arcade-goer (I actually follow competitive fast draw to an extent, and I’d never heard of the guy before), but his genuinely charismatic presence does lend the game something like an air of credibility? I get the impression he might’ve helped to train some of the other actors on set, since there’s a lot of neat flourishes and clean draws to appreciate if you’re the sort who has an eye for that sort of thing. (Of course, there are also deliberately clumsy opponents who hesitate or stumble in their draws, giving you additional time to work with on the easier difficulties.) The game’s whole emphasis is on fast draw, after all: Every encounter begins with your lightgun in the cabinet’s accompanying holster, and requires you to draw and fire the moment you see your target going for their own weapon. Draw too early, and you’ll receive “fouls” that’ll eventually disqualify you from scoring for the round. An on-screen timer indicates your opponent’s draw speed that you’ll have to beat, as well as marking the time it takes you to unholster and fire your own weapon. Three difficulty levels (‘Deputy,’ ‘Sheriff,’ and ‘Marshall’) each pull from their own pools of scenarios, and present six of them to you in a row in random order; to where you might run into completely different sets of opponents on successive replays, since there are over fifty different scenes contained within the game.

Depending on when and where you shoot, some opponents won’t be dispatched with just one shot, and you’ll have to fire a quick follow-up to finish them off. Other scenes feature multiple duelists standing side by side; where you’ll have to quickly determine which one will draw on you first, dispatch them, re-holster your gun, and proceed to immediately duel against a second opponent. If you manage to get through all six rounds without losing a single encounter, you’ll proceed to a ‘Bonus Draw’ against Wes Flowers himself, who obviously represents the quickest opponent in the game. Win or lose, the game ends afterward, and you’re taken to the high score table in order to see how your average draw time compares to other players. Now, I usually don’t care much for trying to get the top spot in arcade games, but I reckon that seeing a Fast Draw Showdown cabinet in the wild might actually bring out my competitive side: Doing away with traditional scoring and emphasizing speed is a novel concept, and makes the pursuit feel far more achievable than trying to beat some trillions-scoring savant at Donkey Kong or Pac-Man or whatever else. Also novel is the cabinet’s vertically-oriented screen, which might seem like a gimmick for the sake of a gimmick; but is actually quite handy in accommodating fast draw, as it narrows your focus and allows you to more quickly line up your lightgun. (The ideal fast draw should see you barely moving your gun away from your holster — effectively firing from the hip, rather than lining your gun up in front of you to aim down the sights.) In case I haven’t made it plainly obvious here, Fast Draw Showdown is very much “my kind of shit,” and is easily my favorite entry in the American Laser Games catalogue. It might not represent the best coin-to-playtime proposition, and it’s as simple as a game of this genre can be; but hot damn if the whole fast draw gimmick doesn’t speak to the cowpoke in me, and make me wish I had my own genuine cabinet to practice on.

Of course, not everyone was as appreciative of Fast Draw Showdown’s charms as I am: The game only ever reached as high as the sixth place top grossing cabinet in the market, and only held that spot for a month’s time before falling out of the top forty completely.^[13] Clearly, the diminishing returns had caught up to American Laser Games, and they were now getting routinely lapped by their competition in the arcades. With this in mind, Fast Draw Showdown and The Last Bounty Hunter represented ALG’s last FMV titles (barring further home conversions of their existing releases), as the company finally began to explore new technologies and business opportunities. For a time, this mostly meant publishing and distributing other studios’ games — taking up the cause for smaller developers, and maybe looking to see if any of them might strike paydirt. Take one-time developer UnderWorld Software’s Blood Bath at Red Falls, for example: One of the most wretched gallery shooters I’ve ever played, with some of the most washed-out digitized sprites ever presented on PC / Mac. It plays like a poor man’s version of Lethal Enforcers, with single-screen stages spawning seemingly endless scores of escapees from a prison bus for you to slaughter. (Maybe the bus doubled as a clown car?) It suffers from the issue of enemies shooting you almost instantaneously upon appearing on screen, making it so that when enemies start appearing on opposite ends of the screen simultaneously, it’s effectively impossible to move your mouse quick enough to avoid taking hits. Just careless game design all around, really. The fact that ALG would ever willingly associate themselves with shovelware of this pedigree goes to show just how dire the straits for them at this point were. A slightly improved case is Morpheus Interactive’s VR Stalker for the 3DO, which ALG took up publishing: Another example of a studio making a sole contribution to the industry, in the form of a combat flight simulator taking place in a war-ravaged United States. The game was billed as the 3DO’s “first flight sim game” (despite it being beaten to market by Electronic Arts’ Shock Wave by a month’s time), but all the marketing effort ALG could muster did little to improve its fortunes in the market.

“Game conversion is as easy as changing
your jukebox CDs.”
Promotional flyer for American Laser Games’
‘CD ROM Game System.’

And then there was American Laser Games’ attempt to bring Naughty Dog’s digitized fighter Way of the Warrior to the arcade [from the 3DO], which evidently fell apart past a certain point. Perhaps good taste prevailed in this case, and the port was canceled as a measure of quality control? More likely, ALG ran out of money or otherwise failed to uphold their end of a contract, resulting in the conversion being dropped from their release schedule. Either way, Naughty Dog dodged a bullet here by not involving themselves with ALG, and leaving their sub-par fighting game to be buried by the sands of time — moving on to far more prolific and profitable projects. The same could not be said of others who chose to involve themselves with ALG, unfortunately. For a tragic example, take ALG’s “prolific” partnership with Quantum Quality Productions: A software house established in 1991 specializing in strategy titles for MS-DOS (including the Perfect General series), who also dabbled in virtualized card games (such as Solitaire’s Journey and Lucky’s Casino Adventure). After distributing their hybrid “Hangman-meets-Mastermind” title Zig-Zag in 1994, ALG bought out the company outright, and went on to publish three more titles under their shared banner. But in late 1995, all of QQP’s staff were apparently blindsided by the sudden shuttering of their studio in late 1995, leaving two games still in development unfinished (tentatively titled ‘Awful Green Things from Outer Space’ and ‘Northlands’).^[14] In fairness, it’s unlikely that QQP were bringing in much of a profit for ALG post-acquisition; but it’s still a shame whenever you see a larger studio swallow a smaller one up, only to shut them down a short time later — effectively admitting to the world (and their hapless new hires) that they really shouldn’t have bought them out in the first place, owing to their own financial instability or incompatible business plans.

The end of 1994 moving into 1995 marked a pivotal moment in American Laser Games’ operations: With the arcade industry as a whole perceived as being in a slump, the path forward for Grebe’s company seemed to be in picking a horse in the home console race, and dedicating themselves to supporting it as best they could. Their pick, of course, wound up being The 3DO Company and their model of 3DO Interactive Multiplayer; which we probably don’t have to tell you wound up being a bad bet. But 3DO offered a compelling business opportunity to ALG, which would’ve served to sweeten the pot: A collaboration in developing an arcade-tailored version of the 3DO hardware, which ALG could leverage in producing modular CD-driven cabinets. In this way, ALG could still keep one foot planted in the market that had brought them their past success — giving them the ability to produce new titles that could be released across arcades and on console, with a minimum of effort required in “converting” them from one platform to the other. This is the real reason why ALG had taken such a keen interest in distribution for other developers’ games: They had hoped to bring the likes of VR Stalker and Way of the Warrior to arcades as proofs of concept for this particular venture, in order to sell arcade operators on the idea of their “low-cost” systems with a supply of easily swappable games. (Certainly cheaper / easier than having to work with traditional models of cabinet conversion kits.) If ALG could’ve pulled it off and made a compelling financial argument to developers / operators, they might’ve wound up with a potentially consistent influx of console-to-arcade [or arcade-to-console] conversions that they could publish, allowing them to take on a more passive role in the industry. But of course, that’s not quite how things wound up turning out, as no other developers were willing to test the waters with the so-called ‘American Laser Games CD ROM System.’ Not without ALG taking the plunge for themselves, first.

And so, it was American Laser Games’ final arcade shooter – 1994’s Shootout at Old Tucson – which would be the first to leverage this new hardware configuration; presenting a 2D game with actors rendered as digitized sprites, set in one of their familiar Old West settings. As a matter of fact, all the backgrounds in the game are rendered from digitized photographs, which were taken during production of Fast Draw Showdown — likely repurposed reference photos, originally shot as part of Fast Draw’s location scouting process.^[9c] In other words, we’re talking about an incredibly cheap production here for Old Tucson: A game stitched together with the scraps from previous projects, which so clearly paled in comparison to other years-old arcade titles. I hate to keep bringing up Lethal Enforcers as a point of comparison, but it’s clear that ALG were doing their damnedest to model themselves after those titles, and falling way short of the mark. It’s genuinely sad to see how far the company had fallen — how utterly exposed they were without the benefit of full-motion video to hide the shortcomings of their game design. But they had already gone ahead with manufacturing their new cabinet line and selling operators on the promise of more games to come (probably making similar promises to The 3DO Company as well), and so they had no choice but to fulfill their commitment here. As such, the next game to release for their CD ROM Systems would be… Mad Dog II: The Lost Gold? Yeah, they really went ahead and tried to sell operators on an arcade port of a console conversion of a game that had already had its moment in the market — now with the added benefit of lower video quality on CD-ROM! Clearly, ALG had hoped to have some other title waiting in the wings by this point in time, ready to make its arcade debut. But at the risk of spoiling things, that third party support never materialized: It was all downhill for ALG from here on out, as seemingly everyone else had already seen the writing on the wall for them.

By now, American Laser Games had finally assembled an internal team capable of developing non-FMV titles, and were eager to put them to work on their next wave of releases for the 3DO and CD ROM System. If not them, who else was gonna support it? And so, their next title would be the oddball 1995 arcade release Orbatak (originally advertised as ‘Rollerball’): A trackball game where you control combatants housed in large spheres, who are made to roll into each other within small arenas as they attempt to either destroy each other or knock the other off the sides of the stage. Think of the ‘Bumper Balls’ minigame from Mario Party, but with surprise bits of pixelated gore if you manage to destroy your opponent’s ball and proceed to crush them underneath the weight of your own. It’s an idea which almost works as an arcade title, but which is hampered by how claustrophobic the tiny stages wind up being; where once you start to pick up speed with your sphere, you just wind up bouncing against the walls multiple times in the course of a second, if not rolling yourself right out of the arena entirely. It’s also the sort of game that calls for items and power-ups to appear that might give a struggling player an opportunity to mount a comeback, but instead presents itself as a totally no-frills affair, where the only modifiers come in the form of pads that occasionally appear in the stages that’ll either launch you into the air or teleport you from one corner to another. It’s clear that the team responsible had a potentially compelling concept in mind for the game, but weren’t given the time or resources to fully flesh it out — that all they could do was implement the basics of their proposed gameplay, before the word came down from on high that it was “good enough as is” to print and ship. After all, ALG had to keep pumping out new titles for their CD ROM System, so there was precious little time to ensure that the games they were producing were actually any good.

Which finally brings us to Mazer. The impression that I get is that American Laser Games needed to demonstrate that they could successfully bring a game from the 3DO into the arcade (not counting Mad Dog II), and so went ahead with developing Mazer for the home console first. Of course, the underlying 3DO hardware that drove the CD ROM Systems was effectively identical to the console, so this was really just a matter of deciding which platform they wanted to issue the disc for initially — not requiring a whole new team to remake the same game with different specifications in mind. As such, if you access the credits in Shootout at Old Tucson’s and Orbatak‘s arcade releases, you’ll see a few names shared in common with Mazer‘s on-console staff: Artists Darren Thorne, Maida Smith, and Jeffrey Baker; as well as composer Gino Rascon. Mazer’s credited lead programmer Nathanael Brown actually came on loan from another subsidiary studio operating under ALG, which had been working on their own debut title since 1994; but we’ll get to covering them in depth later, since they wouldn’t actually end up releasing said game until later in 1995. The point I want to make here is, the teams assigned to these 3DO / CD ROM System games were notably very slim — rarely consisting of more than eight or so names, and usually entailing developers pulling double-duty as actors within the game. In the case of Mazer, all four of the game’s playable characters are actually digitized likenesses of ALG staff; including Darren, Jeffrey, Maida, and Nathanael. It’s not too often when you get to ask the question “who made this video game I’m currently playing,” and the answer is immediately presented to you in portrait form on the character select screen.

Mazer would see its home console release for the 3DO on July 31st, 1995. While the game was planned to later ship to the CD ROM System in arcades, this move never wound up happening, relegating Mazer to a role as a console exclusive. (Darren Thorne recalls designing marquee and panel art for the game’s cabinet, and the CD ROM System version getting as far as being location tested at local Albuquerque arcades.)**** It’s likely that only a select few at American Laser Games suspected that this was to be their swan song — the final title to be developed in-house by the company and successfully released to consumers. Reflecting on the five year journey we’ve covered at this point, Mazer feels so far removed from the likes of where we started with Mad Dog McCree — completely lacking in any detectable throughlines that would make the transition make some sort of sense. But as we’ll discover within the contents of the game itself, Mazer wasn’t the end result of any sort of “evolution” in the way that ALG approached game design: It’s a product of absolute desperation — a last-ditch effort in appealing to a consumer market that had long-since passed them by, and attempting to prove that they could adapt and conform to changing tastes. Whether or not Mazer was actually successful in grabbing that audience’s attention, we still need to see for ourselves if the game was worth giving a look — theoretically spending a handful of quarters on at the arcade, or a full $64.95 (USD) as it would’ve cost for the 3DO on launch.

** This claim of mine is admittedly somewhat speculative. Never mind the fact that we’re not even sure as to how the Apogee system accounted for its location damage, and if it actually utilized multiple on-screen hitboxes appearing at the same time: All I can really speak to is the fact that American Laser Games’ output rarely (if ever) seemed to deal in providing multiple target areas during action scenes, as they noticeably choreographed their film shoots around this apparent limitation. The only instances in which you’re given “choice” between multiple target areas occur on static screens, such as the menus appearing in Who Shot Johnny Rock? and Crime Patrol. With this in mind, it’s either a technical limitation of having to account for hitboxes around moving targets, or a deliberate production decision made to streamline their film shoots / potentially save on disc space.

*** On the subject of games aping American Laser Games’ style: There’s actually a case where ALG attempted to file suit against another company for perceived infringement of their intellectual property rights! The game in contention was Spanish studio Picmatic’s ‘Zorton Brothers’ — an FMV arcade title with lightgun input, set in the Old West [as shot in Spain]. Apparently, Picmatic had reached an arrangement with Namco of America to distribute the game in North American arcades, and were on track to do so after a showing at the 1993 ACME (American Coin Machine Exposition) trade show. Unfortunately, representatives from ALG were in attendance at the same show, noticed what Picmatic was showcasing, and alleged that the studio had “copied significant portions of American Laser Games’ copyrighted arcade game.”^[15] (To be clear: Zorton Brothers leverages entirely original footage, and doesn’t lift assets directly from any of ALG’s releases.) I couldn’t track down any follow-up coverage on the results of the suit, but it appears the legal threat was enough to stymie Picmatic’s expansion into the North American arcade market. The game did get an MS-DOS re-imagining three years later though; rechristened as Los Justicieros (🔊), and incorporating newly-crafted adventure game elements between the shootout scenes.

**** This testimony comes from a comment left on a YouTube video – a playthrough of Orbatak by the ‘Archive 3DO’ channel – by an account with the username “d thorne.” In a comment thread, the user claims to be no less than Darren Thorne himself (who seems surprised to see someone somehow playing Orbatak in the year 2019), and details how the game evidently went on to sell very few copies to arcade operators. He goes on to describe the process of readying CD ROM System titles for location testing: “At that point, besides working on the games themselves, I was creating initial cabinet art in house and I held on to a few pieces that didn’t come out well enough for the test machines. It was either throw them away or roll them up and keep them as memories. We would test the games in local [Albuquerque] arcades using those demo cabinets.”

“The Action of a Fighting Game. The Strategy of a Maze Game.”

“The action of a fighting game.
The strategy of a maze game.”
North American back cover.

The future is bleak, folks: Before humankind gets a chance to realize its dream of rendering our own planet uninhabitable, a species of alien invaders known as the ‘Semag-Resal’ (hailing from the ‘Nacierma’ system, naturally) seize control of Earth, and begin ruling over us with an army of combat drones. Resistance efforts are mounted, but seem utterly ineffective against the strength of the invaders’ seemingly endless supply of war machines, made to guard their impregnable military bases. Worse yet, the Semag-Resal have begun research on developing weaponized human cyborgs, with the goal of using them to infiltrate the last remaining pockets of Earth’s resistance and destroy them from within. To this end, the aliens have begun abducting humans to experiment on and augment — bringing them to their fortified facilities where all hope of rescue seems lost. I mean, if all our armies have already fallen, and our most well-organized groups of armed resistance seem completely ineffective in retaliating against our evil overlords, what’s left to attack the aliens with? Surely, we can’t expect something like a single soldier to get the job done, even if we equipped them with all the latest in scientific and military technology. Well, believe it or not, that’s actually the plan here: Our last hope falls on one volunteer soldier (or two, in multiplayer) loaded for bear with a “bio-enhancer,” an “energy shield,” and whatever their personal weapon of choice may be. They’ll have to single-handedly liberate fifteen of the Semag-Resal’s facilities – destroying every robot and freeing every captured human they can along the way – before reaching the enemy’s headquarters, and prevailing in a final showdown against the “sentient ‘boss’ robot.” It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it… namely, you, assuming your role as one of the chosen warriors.

Let’s meet our cast of four selectable characters: First, there’s Arashi (portrayed by Jeffrey Baker) hailing from Japan, who’s described as “the youngest samurai in Japanese history.” He wields a ‘Lightning Sword’ supposedly crafted by the god Hachiman himself, which carries with it the ability to launch electric projectiles. Next up is Azotar (Nathanael Brown) from Spain, who trained as the son of a matador. He evidently detests the use of guns on the grounds that they are “unmanly,” and carries an ‘Energy Whip’ in firearm’s stead. Then there’s Freon (Maida Smith) emanating from Iceland, who claims to be a descendant of the historic viking Leif Ericsson. She carries an ‘Ice Cannon’ into combat, as an embodiment of her “cold-blooded battle ethic and frigid homeland.” Which leaves us with Hawk (Darren Thorne), who came all the way out from Alaska to kick alien ass. As a former member of the US Special Forces, he carries a standard issue of ‘Pulse Cannon / Flamethrower,’ with which he wages his one-man war to “destroy all alien life on earth and restore human rule.” In addition to each character’s weapon having [slightly] different effects in combat, they also boast somewhat unique ‘Special Abilities’; allowing Azotar and Arashi to teleport across the screen, giving Azotar the additional ability to lasso his enemies toward him, and for Freon and Hawk to unleash some alternate attacks of their own. But in truth, none of these distinctions are really too significant (save for Azotar’s whip limiting his attack’s range / ability to rapidly fire): In the heat of battle, these characters all wind up feeling largely the same as one another; which I suppose is fair enough, given that it puts them on a more-or-less even playing field. Your choice in character mostly comes down to whether or not you wanna play as a white person, or as a white person embodying a racial stereotype.

Before launching into the game proper, you can hang on the title screen and allow the game to go into its arcade attract mode; where you’ll be treated to a decently-animated FMV intro (🔊) setting up the game’s story, info cards on the eclectic cast of characters, and a brief demo play acting as a tutorial. Pressing ‘Play / Pause’ (the 3DO controller’s equivalent of a ‘Start’ button) will immediately take you to the character select screen, as if inserting a coin into an arcade cabinet and pressing its start button. That means you get nothing in the way of options; be they difficulty selection, sound adjustment, or password entry to pick up play in one of the later levels. This is just about as no-frills as you can get for a home console release in 1995; which I suppose is befitting of the fact that Mazer really was intended as an arcade title first and foremost, with the home console experience as something of an afterthought. Bearing that design philosophy in mind, there actually is an interesting “secret” feature you can unlock before the game starts: By holding down the ‘C’ and ‘L’ buttons on the controller during the attract mode, you can actually enter into an arcade-style “Service Menu” for the game, which grants you access to a limited number of operator functions; including a ‘Hardware Test’ for confirming controller inputs are working, as well as a ‘Version’ page to confirm that you’re playing the “1.0” release [as well as containing a short list of the game’s credits]. Most interesting though is the ‘Game Settings’ menu option, which actually lets you select between three difficulty levels (Easy, Normal, and Hard), as well as enabling or disabling blood effects during gameplay. Why are these options locked behind a secret menu that 99% of players would never figure out how to access? The answer is as simple as the developers not having the time or inclination to design as much as a basic menu screen for the console release — caring so little about the consumer experience, that they didn’t even deem it “worth the effort” to throw up some lines of text under a graphic of the game’s logo.

Selecting a character takes you to a screen that scrolls through a list of the game’s fifteen stages. Each of them is represented by a thumbnail image and briefly descriptive title, indicating their basic theming: ‘The Grid’ hints at an abstract technological construct, ‘The Sand’ takes place in a small patch of desert, and ‘The Volcano’ can be assumed to take place in the molten core of an active powder keg. Other stage names are more vague; such as ‘The Reactor’ taking place around some sort of energy-conducting device, ‘The Generator’ having some sort of electrical gimmick, ‘The Arena’ ostensibly making for an alien colosseum, and ‘The Cyborgs’ pitting you against humans-turned-machines. Also on that level scroll, you’ll likely notice that half the stage names have a suffix of ‘II’ attached to their titles (in example; ‘The Volcano II’); which indicates that there’s only really eight unique tilesets in the game, as each of them are repeated once over [with different layouts and tougher bosses]. I, for one, am fine with this conceptually as a means of padding out the game: Seeing as each stage runs roughly just a minute and a half in length (and that’s if you’re “taking it slow”), it’s fair for the developers to want to stretch those assets out a bit. Each tileset also comes paired with its own unique set of enemies and dedicated boss to boot, and are largely distinct from one another aesthetically for it. A few even have their own variety of stage hazards, making them that much more distinct. It’s just a shame then that all of them amount to the same premise and approach in terms of actual gameplay, as your basic objectives remain the same across all of them.

Here’s how almost any given stage in Mazer plays out: You spawn in some corner of a single-screen arena, along with an endless procession of stage-specific baddies. At the center of the screen is an object that you’ll have to shoot and destroy (referred to as an “energizer”), in order to spawn the boss. But before you do that, you’re inclined to rescue as many of the humans trapped in stasis pods around the periphery of the stage as you can (between six or twelve of them), who will grant you power-ups for doing so. And so, after saving as many humans as you can and breaking down whatever walls are in the way of the center of the map, you unload on the totem until the boss appears; at which point enemies stop spawning in, and you’re left to focus on whittling down the big bad’s health bar. Take them down [without running out of lives], get rewarded with a brief FMV cutscene of their demise, and rinse, lather, repeat. About the only shake-ups to this formula are a small handful of levels where stage hazards / the energizer at the center of the screen take the place of the endlessly spawning enemies, but this shouldn’t meaningfully affect your approach: Trying to clear the screen of enemies is already a fool’s errand as is, and your immediate goal should always be to work towards the center and spawn the boss in. Even rescuing the captive humans should come second to that, since the rewards you’ll get for saving them rarely exceed the damage you’ll take from enemies while doing so. But we’ll get more into that in time: For now, we should probably explain how you actually go about controlling your chosen character.

The 3DO controller gives you a D-pad, three face buttons labeled A through C, two shoulder buttons, and two option buttons typically intended for menu access and media navigation. In Mazer, the D-pad serves to move you across the screen, as expected. Pressing A will perform your basic attack once, while holding it allows you to rapidly fire it off. Theoretically, holding the A button while moving should allow you to “strafe” — to continue firing in a given direction even as you alternate movement directions. In actual execution, this rarely works as you’d want it to, as getting damaged will break your stance and change your direction to face whatever hit you. (Also, Azotar and his whip are unable to access this ability at all, due to their melee nature.) Holding the C button will activate your power shield and absorb damage, as well as inflicting damage on enemies and walls (plus busting open stasis pods) if you collide with them while your shield is active. The R button will allow you to jump some distance, which is only ever situationally useful. That leaves the B button, which activates your bio-enhancer for a ‘Turbo’ boost to any of the functions listed above: More powerful attacks, a more damaging shield, higher / longer jumps, and faster movement. I’d dare say that your Turbo button is the most important in the entire game, since your attacks and ability to outmaneuver enemies are effectively useless without it held down, especially when it comes to the bosses. Also, before I forget: Pressing A and C simultaneously will activate your character’s special ability / attack, but this is an incredibly clumsy input with a minimum of practical reward for contorting your fingers to enter it. Better to pretend it doesn’t even exist, and focus on the essentials here.

With all those ducks in a row, let’s get into some gameplay: Starting in the game’s first stage – ‘The Grid’ – you’ll get a chance to acclimate yourself to the game’s controls, as well as get a handle on its isometric perspective. Not only that, but it’ll also give you a pretty good impression of how the next fourteen stages are all gonna play out. When it comes to getting a grip on movement, you’ll find that your inputs are all responsive enough, and that the 3/4th angle on the action isn’t a particularly difficult obstacle to overcome or anything. Having eight directions of movement means that you can totally choose to just move in the cardinal directions and avoid having to deal with diagonals, if that’s a perceptionary struggle for you [as it sometimes is for me]. In fact, I’d probably go ahead and recommend playing in this way, since lining up attacks diagonally is one of the few genuine bits of struggle in controlling the game: There’s something unpredictable in where your character actually launches their diagonal projectiles from, where I found myself frequently missing targets by shooting just a little too high or low. Also, while your default run speed doesn’t feel especially slow or sluggish, you’ll find that it isn’t quite quick enough to dodge most enemies or their attacks. You’ll find yourself wanting to rely on your bio-enhanced boost to more effectively dodge the various dangers, but doing so will quickly waste your Turbo meter — a precious resource which doesn’t replenish over time, and which requires picking up power-ups in order to partially restore. Just bear that fact in mind if “Gotta go fast” is your guiding life philosophy, and your tendency is to want to sprint across the stage at all times.

If you don’t know any better going into Mazer, you’ll probably try to kill some of the spheroid robot enemies in this stage as your first course of action. Of course, this is a huge mistake, as they just spawn back in as quickly as you manage to kill them — less than a second’s time, by my estimation. That said, leaving them to their own devices will lead to them pursuing you across the entire stage making a bee-line toward you at all times; firing projectiles if they have them, or otherwise closing distance until they collide with you for damage. So, how do you deal with their constant attempts at causing bodily harm? You might think to turn on your shield and deflect some of that damage, as well as enabling yourself to run right through any enemy in your way. And while this is absolutely the ideal strategy, it comes at the cost of depleting your shield with each contact, and depriving you of the ability to use it during the boss fight where it’s entirely more vital. Unlike the Turbo function, there’s no on-screen meter that displays how much shield juice you have left, and so your only feedback is how transparent the shield appears around your character. In this way, it’s easy to accidentally run out of power on it without noticing, and leaving yourself completely vulnerable to attack once it’s out. And much like the Turbo power, the only way to replenish your shield is to pick up associated power-ups, which come few and far between. It’s around here where you’ll figure out that just tanking through the minimal damage is the better option, as hits from standard enemies do a fraction of damage compared to a blow from a boss. There’s no real challenge or danger when it comes to Mazer‘s cast of baddies: They’re just a minor nuisance that exists to knock you out of attacking the energizer in the center of the map. The only real threat they represent is in cornering you as a group effort; where if you’ve already depleted your shields, they can lock you into an inescapable hit-stun scenario, leading to some frustrating deaths.

Burning through your Turbo and shield power is what will likely prompt you to try rescuing some of the captured humans, who spawn power-ups on the screen after having been liberated. These comprise meager 20% restorations to either your health, shield, or Turbo meter; which frankly feel a little lacking, given how quickly you expend these resources, and how you’ll likely deplete more in the process of rescuing the humans than you’ll ultimately get back in rewards. Still, getting something is better than nothing, and you might want to try for these drops in dire straits. There’s a formula in place here where the first human you rescue will immediately grant you one of these pick-ups, and from there on out it’ll be every other human you rescue who does the same. If you can manage to rescue all of the captives in the stage, the last one will spawn in one of the game’s more powerful / coveted power-ups; including a ‘Tri-Attack’ modifier on your weapon good for thirty uses, a ‘Rapid Fire’ modifier which gives you thirty faster-firing automatic projectiles, and a one-time use ‘Super Shield’ ability that effectively acts as a screen-clearing smart bomb. Of course, this last ability keeps the enemies off your back for a scant few seconds, so you have to be very tactical in your deployment of it… which is difficult to do, when it’s activated by simply trying to use your shield. As such, you’ll probably wind up using it on accident moments after acquiring it, so maybe plan accordingly around that. Oh, and all those power-up pick-ups disappear if you don’t collect them within ten seconds, so there’s no way to litter the map with them and save them for when you “really need them.”

Of course, all those pick-ups and enemies are pretty much a non-factor, as we said earlier: The ideal strategy in any stage still centers around getting to the center of the screen, blowing open the energizer, and spawning the boss in as fast as you can. From there, the remaining enemies on screen will likely eventually get killed in the crossfire between you and the boss, leaving you to face your foe one on one. The first stage boss is some model of bipedal tank, which chases after you and intermittently fires lasers in your direction. What you’ll quickly realize is that there’s no real running away from it: They keep pace with your run speed, and are always on a direct line headed toward you. If there are still walls left in the stage to get in their way, they’ll knock them down sooner than later, and you won’t have anything left to put in the way of their shots. All you can do is stand and fight; using whatever remaining shield you might have left to try and deflect some of their projectiles, and your dwindling Turbo to supercharge your attacks. The most effective offense you have at your disposal winds up being a Turbo-powered melee attack, where if you press the A button [with B held down] in close proximity to an enemy, you’ll actually knock them backwards a bit, and buy yourself a moment where they’re not damaging you; all on top of doing the most significant harm to their health bar that you’re capable of. And so, the winning tactic emerges: Get in close, knock them back, get close again, and eventually prevail. Only one slight wrinkle, which you may have already intuited: Sooner or later, you’re gonna run out of Turbo power. And once you’re out of that, your shields and / or health will soon be the next to follow. What’s a bionic commando to do when that happens?

First, the game will throw you a bit of a bone: Once your health is detected as dropping below 40%, a pad matching your player color (blue for 1P, red for 2P) will appear on the floor for a few seconds. Making your way to it and standing atop it will replenish 20% of your health, shields, and Turbo meters. Of course, you only get one of these restores per life, and it doesn’t really amount to much in the grand scheme of things — maybe lets you get a couple of extra hits in on the boss. So, what then? Well, you wind up dying, naturally: There’s just no good strategy for taking out the bosses without the benefit of your Turbo meter, since you can’t outrun or out-damage them. (At least not in single-player mode.) But here’s the trick: When you spawn in with a new life, all your meters are topped back up, giving you the strength you’ll need to get back in the fight. And so, that becomes a tactic in itself: Expending all the meter you have on the boss, letting yourself get killed, and popping back in to unleash your most powerful attacks again. Look, I’m sure there’s some sort of tedious, protracted way you can effectively kite the bosses around and get enough of your basic attacks in to do them in; at least in the cases of some of the earlier bosses, with their lesser amounts of health. But there’s no reason not to just burn through lives here, considering that the game gives you infinite continues — without a penalty to your score, to boot. The only thing you have to consider is that if you lose your last life during a stage and have to continue, you’ll also have to start the stage over again from the top. That means you have a maximum of three lives to burn on any given stage, so you’ll have to be effective in your allotment of Turbo meter per life. But I assure you that it’s entirely doable, even as the bosses start to ramp up in difficulty.

So, that’s really how every stage across the rest of the game is gonna play out: A cycle of ignoring enemies, spawning bosses, and letting loose with everything you’ve got across however many lives you have to spare. Anything else is just busywork to make you feel like there might be some other way to approach Mazer. Like, take the bonus stages, for example: Between every other stage, you’ll warp into a sixteen-second round in a larger map littered with pick-ups, in order to replenish your meters and maybe grab a few of the attack power-ups. The items appear on small islands in the middle of an ocean of glowing tiles, which acts like water and slows you down if you wade through them. The trick here is to use your jump to leap over the slowing tiles, and circle your way around the stage picking up as much as you can. After all, the game doesn’t top your meters up between stages on its own; so if you’re committed to trying to clear the game with a minimum on theoretical “credits,” you’ve gotta run the bonus stages as effectively as you can. Oh, but make sure you make it to the exit portal before the time runs out though, or you won’t actually receive any of the rewards you picked up during it. Past a certain point, these maps and their pick-ups get to be too spread out to feasibly collect everything in time – even if you waste some of your Turbo running to try and nab everything quicker – so you just have to grab what you can and hope it’s stuff that you actually need. Again, this is all in the service of trying to extend lives as much as you can, so the whole endeavor is ultimately unnecessary if you’re intent on just burning through your given allotment. But hey, at least it’s still something that breaks up the monotony of the gameplay a bit.

Even though we’ve pretty much already covered all there is to the gameplay at this point, we’re still gonna do our usual routine of covering every level in brief, even if it’ll mostly just amount to noting slight deviations and aesthetic notes. But before we get into that, we do need to talk about the game’s presentation as a whole, since American Laser Games did so pride themselves on their “style over substance” approach to game design. Of course, we’re a long ways away from the FMV games they built their empire on top of; and by this point in their brief history, it all effectively amounted to an empire of dirt anyway. As such, Mazer represents something like a desperate attempt to appear “cutting-edge” in a format they were still largely unfamiliar with, without the benefit of their traditional full-motion smoke and mirrors. ALG’s solution to this problem primarily seems to come down to theming: They must’ve figured that by setting their gameplay against vaguely futuristic electronic backdrops, and making you battle against armies of robots, it’d somehow trick players into thinking the game itself was futuristic. Plus, they probably felt like they needed to distance themselves from their western titles as much as possible, in order to avoid being associated with “days past” — in terms of both setting and their own prospects as an ongoing business. The problem is, most of the stages in Mazer amount to visual barf: A mish-mash of disparate elements and garish color choices, as viewed through the pixelated lens of a constantly zooming camera and janky scaling algorithm. It’s clear that the stages were drawn and intended to be displayed in full on the screen at a 320 by 240 pixel resolution, so when the camera starts to zoom in on them to follow your character, they get to be so blown-up and blocky that they’re honestly difficult to parse. A few levels do hold up better than others: The technological maps with square-tiled floors aren’t as badly affected by the scaling, since they’re composed of simple geometric shapes. But any stage that attempts to incorporate textured elements like stone or metal just wind up being thoroughly unpleasant to look at, past a certain threshold of zoom.

Of course, backgrounds are just one component of the unappealing design in Mazer. If you’ll remember back to 1995, the go-to trick for presenting your 2D games as graphically impressive was digitized actors serving as your sprites. And so, Mazer embraces that fad in the form of its playable characters — its developers dressed up as a soldier, samurai, matador, and vaguely-defined techno-viking; and photographed performing actions from five different angles [with mirror images used for the total of eight facing directions in game]. Now, here’s the problems with their approach here: For one, the compositing job in getting rid of the backdrops they took their photos in front of is decidedly poor, as incongruous purple pixels permeate the finalized sprites in the game. (Freon’s sprites are the worst offenders here, on account of stray hairs in the white wig she was made to wear.) If you’re not looking at leftover chroma key artifacts, you’re instead seeing how poorly the cropping around the actors was handled, where various appendages grow and shrink in perceived circumference from frame to frame. There’s also the matter of how the angles the actors were captured at aren’t consistent between animations, such as the case of Arashi’s left and right-facing attack animations: Clearly, the angle used to capture his standing and walking animations is slightly different from the same one used in capturing his sword swings, to where his head seems to double in size the moment you press the A button. Mixed with the game’s propensity for zooming in way too close and distorting everything on-screen, you’ll come away with a perceptionary sensation I’ve seen described as feeling like the graphics are “swimming” — as if your display is warping the visuals in the same way as looking at something submerged in water, affected by the ripples of waves. (For a worst-case example of this in action, see Medal of Honor: Underground’s conversion to the Game Boy Advance.) Needless to say, this is all pretty far from ideal, and has the potential to genuinely sicken a subset of susceptible players.

Where it comes to sprites representing the game’s enemies and various stage props, they’re all acceptable enough I suppose: Their being designed with specific tilesets in mind means they pair up well enough in terms of coloration, and feel like they belong within those given environments. The cast of baddies aren’t particularly inspired, mind you; as they all largely adhere to archetypical robot designs, barring maybe a couple of unique boss concepts the artists came up with. (In example; a tentacled robot that appears as the boss in ‘The Generator’ stages.) For the most part though, expect a lot of MechWarrior-esque bipedal war machines, and blocky bots akin to ‘Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots.’ Again, they’re all fine in terms of underlying design and rendering, but get done dirty by the game’s constant upscaling. But where the boss designs in particular get to “shine” is in their death animations: Pre-rendered FMV cutscenes which play after destroying a boss and completing a stage. ALG must’ve really thought they were showing off here by cutting to videos between each stage, as players are treated to the bosses falling to bits in glorious 90s CG fashion — complete with perfectly spherical explosion effects and highly noticeable compression artifacts. These animations also seem to try and hint at every stage being connected by tunnel systems and holes in the ground leading from one to the other, which the camera will push into after watching the boss reduced to scrap. But I’m not sure if these transitions make any sort of real spatial sense, since every stage takes place in such unique biomes and disparate climates? Personally, I’d have just cut all these animations a few seconds early, and maybe allocated a few more megabytes to higher quality video files.

We may as well take the opportunity here to address the other half of Mazer‘s audio-visual component, those being the sound effects and background music. The game is scored by a generic rock soundtrack, which suits the action just fine with its wailing electronic guitar chords and synthesized beats. A couple of stages break from formula to play more “ambient” tracks, but nothing on display strikes me as particularly remarkable. Which is a shame, seeing as American Laser Games’ FMV titles were always driven by genuinely catchy little ditties — “Mickey Mousing” in time with the action beats, and playing with instrumentation fitting each game’s unique setting and time period. I suppose you can’t really expect that same level of synchronized score in an arcade action game, but my issue is more to do with the fact that the soundtrack here is just generic as can be, and doesn’t particularly play to the kitschy futuristic theming. But whatever: It’s not like it’s offensive to the ears or anything. The bigger issue is the fact that the music is so loud in the volume mix, to where the sound effects are barely audible under it. If there are any audio cues you’re meant to rely on in Mazer in order to determine when an enemy is about to launch an attack, they certainly don’t stand out underneath the blaring soundtrack. The only sound effects that really stand out from the cacophony of laser fire and explosions are the player characters’ pain grunts, which are shared / recycled across all four protagonists (including Freon). Granted, this can be a key bit of feedback to let you know when you’re taking damage, so it’s good that they’re slightly elevated in the mix. But the fact that all four characters share the same small handful of samples means that in two-player play, there’s no distinguishing who or where they’re coming from. This is ultimately a pretty minor nitpick though, all told, since Mazer’s sound design is ultimately an inessential component in its gameplay. You’ll do just as well turning the game down and cranking up some era-appropriate 90s prog rock jams.^[♫]

Alright, now that we’ve got all that presentational stuff out of the way, let’s get back to some gameplay: Clearing The Grid will take you into the first bonus stage, and then into your first excursion in ‘The Sand.’ Curiously, the standard enemies here appear as slight recolors of the first stage’s boss, though they mercifully go down in just one or two hits the same as any other standard enemy. The energizer in this stage appears at the top of the screen rather than dead center, and occasionally launches mines that’ll detonate if you get too close to them, which are really the only things that stand to differentiate it in terms of gameplay. (That, and the dull brown color scheme that all the assets in the level adhere to, if you wanna count that.) Destroying the totem spawns the boss, who behaves identically to the one from the previous stage, while looking like they have two completely different designs depending on what angle you look at them from: Either a classic cardboard-box style blocky robot from the side view, or more like a Metal Gear from other perspectives. I didn’t think it was possible for a model to look so wildly different from different angles when you’re ostensibly rotating the same lump of polygons around in 3D space, but Mazer is just chock-full of surprises. In any event, this boss goes down easily enough your first time facing it, and from there it’s off to ‘The Grid II’: A reprise of the first stage with a ton more walls getting in your way, and a version of the same boss with what appears to be double its original health. All the same strategies still apply here, but expect them to take twice as long to bust up the double-strength mech. This’ll set the precedent for all the “II” variants on stages moving forward, as the team’s primary method of ramping up the difficulty just amounts to doubling health bars.

After a second bonus round, you’re deposited into ‘The Reactor,’ which is the first stage to not feature roaming enemies. Instead, the energizer itself presents the risk, in the form of acid spit and missiles. Somehow though, I’m not sure if the acid attacks are actually capable of damaging you, as they just seem to phase right through your character in most cases? Those missiles pack a wallop though, and you’d do well to put up your shield to absorb them while attacking at a distance. After breaking down the energizer, a stationary boss will spawn in its place, lashing out with tentacles that make close-range attacks a dangerous prospect. (God help you if you’re playing as Azotar on this stage.) The trick is to just keep doing what you were doing in destroying the energizer, by keeping your distance and shielding against the missiles — taking a breather to rescue the captives if you need to stock up on some emergency supplies. There are also pools of water surrounding the boss which you can submerge yourself in and potentially mount your attack from, where I saw one guide suggest that they put you out of striking distance of all the boss’s attacks? But I couldn’t actually get that to work in any of my own attempts, so I just wound up having to jump out of the pools after a while and picking back up with my working strategy. (They also recommend jumping over the missiles instead of using your shield, which I had inconsistent success with.) All in all, this stage at least makes for a novel change of pace, and mixes up the mechanics slightly in a way that seems to suggest the rest of the game might continue in that approach. We’ll see how true that turns out to be.

The Reactor gives way to ‘The Sand II;’ which, of course, is just The Sand again with more walls in the way and more boss health. Moving right along then (and past another bonus stage), we find ourselves in ‘The Arena’: A reddish technobase-type level with large silver robots chasing you around — larger than the actual stage boss, even. By this point, Mazer’s standard stage formula has been firmly established, and none of the enemies behaviors should come as any surprise here: The boss robot with Devo “energy domes” for feet chases you around the stage while firing projectiles, and devastates if you let them get within close proximity; necessitating your knocking them back with a Turbo-charged melee attack, or otherwise running around in circles hoping to fire the occasional projectile attack behind yourself. This seems like as good a time as any to recommend a potential third tactic: Getting a second player to endure Mazer with you, where the boss will only be able to chase after one of you at a time. In this way, the best strategy for dealing with bosses is for one player to effectively serve as bait for the killer robot, while the other stays a safe distance away sniping at them. Alternatively, you can try to lure the boss between you and your ally to where you can hopefully lock them into a hit stun situation with your melee strikes, and bully them into submission for the most effective anti-boss tactic in the game! The only tricky part is that the boss may occasionally change their target and necessitate the switching up of roles between players, but this tactic is still the only one I can imagine being practical in attempting to conserve your lives through the course of a playthrough… save for the fact that “friendly fire” is a constant consideration you’ll have to account for, where it is exceedingly easy to accidentally wing your partner with your projectile fire / melee strikes. So, if you seriously intend to survive the game with your lives [and your friendship] intact, players will have to maintain a safe distance from one another at all times. Or, you can choose to just embrace the chaos, and beat the hell out of each other with the benefit of infinite continues at your disposal. (If you were playing Mazer in an arcade at a cost of 25¢ per continue, I imagine this would be a less amusing prospect.)

Sticking with the two-player mechanics for a little longer: You may be wondering how the game accounts for the use of continues if one player runs out of lives while the other is still up and about? The knocked out player will simply have to wait until the next stage to spawn back in, or for the other player to run out of lives and restart the level themselves. It should be noted that you get to choose which character you want to respawn as when using a continue (in either single-player or multiplayer), so anyone who makes the mistake of playing as Azotar can rectify it after their inevitable demise. If both players wanna play as the same character, you’ll have to try and differentiate between them by the subtle recoloring of accessories from blue to red; seen on Arashi’s kataginu, Azotar and Freon’s pants, and a nearly-imperceptible tint on Hawk’s beret. Then there’s the matter of the bonus stages, where you might expect both players to compete against one another simultaneously to pick up as many power-ups for themselves as they can — having the camera zoom out to show both of them on-screen at the same time. Unfortunately, each player just winds up taking turns running through the bonus stages solo, which seems like a missed opportunity for some good old-fashioned resource-stealing chaos. All that really leaves as far as “competition” is concerned is to try and accrue more points in the standard levels than your rival, where whoever lands the final hit on a boss gets a ‘Boss Kill’ score bonus. In other words, there really ain’t much here to compel a friend to play Mazer with you, other than a shared camaraderie in beating sub-par games. This is to say that I personally had no luck in convincing anyone I know to play the game with me, and so I wound up binding movement to dual analog sticks for both player slots for my own testing.

Getting back to the level progression: Next on the docket is ‘The Reactor II,’ which serves as a carbon copy layout of its predecessor since there are no walls in the stage. All that leaves is doubling the boss’s health, which means you’re more likely to run out of shields [due to incoming missiles] during the time it takes to kill the boss from afar. Which brings us to ‘The Generator’: Another stage which swaps out enemies giving chase for a stationary stage hazard, much like The Reactor before it. In this instance, it’s a set of electrically-conductive rods that emerge from the ground, which you can temporarily smash back into the ground like a game of ‘Whac-a-Mole.’ The thing is, they have a nasty habit of zapping the human captives on the map before you get a chance to rescue them, which means you’re unlikely to pick up any good bonus power-ups in this stage. It’s all just as well if you’re just focused on finishing the stage and nailing the boss: A pseudo-reptilian variety of robot, who – despite their unique appearance – doesn’t actually behave any differently from any of the other standard bosses. By this point in the game, facing these baddies gets to feel like a real chore, since they don’t require any unique tactics to defeat that would set any of them apart from the pack. And the sad thing is, it’s not for lack of trying on American Laser Games’ part: If you pay close attention, you’ll notice that a couple of them actually do have slightly different attacks from one another — flamethrowers or spread shots instead of standard projectiles. The developers probably thought they were doing enough to make each of them distinct in this way, in combination with giving them all unique designs. The problem is, it just doesn’t amount to enough in actual execution, since a player is naturally inclined to resort to the “one size fits all” strategy against all of them so long as it keeps on working. Whatever nuances the bosses might have are totally lost in the face of your Turbo-charged melee strikes.

That’s another thing: The playable characters in the game could all stand to be a bit more unique, too. Again, you can’t accuse the team of not trying, as demonstrated by their giving them all unique weapons and special abilities. But again, the problem comes down to a matter of actual execution in the finished product, where they all effectively play the same and rely on a shared one or two tactics in combat. Whether their projectiles look like fireballs or freeze rays is irrelevant when they serve the same basic function and do seemingly the same level of damage. Azotar is the only character who really stands out from the four, and unfortunately for him, his changes just make him an objectively worse pick for a player — unable to deal with enemies at a range, unable to strafe like the other three, and granted a special attack that’s more of a hindrance than a help (by lassoing enemies into his immediate striking range, where they’re liable to get in an attack on him). I almost get the feeling like Azotar was maybe the second character the team implemented, and when they realized how badly they had botched the job on him, they resolved not to rock the boat too hard in designing the remaining two. Really, all they needed to do was make his attacks measurably more powerful to compensate for his lack of range, and maybe give him a boost to his health and shields as an added perk. In fact, giving stat variances to all four of the characters would’ve been a boon to the game — making each of them “specialists” in certain styles of play; whether they be a glass cannon sort with high damage and low health, a speedster with extended Turbo and quicker [albeit weaker] attacks, or a slow-moving tank who can soak up damage. Something must’ve scared ALG off of the idea of making any one of them “incompatible” with how a player might choose to approach the game, and convinced them that parity was the way to go. Either that, or they just didn’t have enough time to make those balance changes. Hell, those variances might actually be present in the game, but are just too subtle to actually discern in gameplay.

‘The Arena II’ actually represents a rare shake-up in the standard second-stage formula: In addition to featuring more walls for you to destroy, the barriers actually spin around in layers of individual circles; making it so that you either have to run through the holes you make before they rotate away, or destroy the layers in their entirety in order to line up shots on the energizer without obstruction. Of course, you can also just use your shield to run right through them and get to the core, and effectively negate the whole mechanic if you so choose. Just make sure you don’t melee strike the energizer as you attempt to destroy it: If your finishing blow is too close to it, you’ll incur a knockdown and damage from its exploding. (This is true in the case of energizers in every stage, but feels particularly relevant here.) Other than that, expect to deal with the same boss with double the HP, as per usual. Victory will take you into the heart of ‘The Volcano,’ where you can expect to face off against some floating robots that look like they’re stingrays made of stone. There are no walls to get in the way of anything here, but you’ll have to keep an eye out for open pools of lava that’ll drain your health mighty quick. (I guess those bio-enhancers keep you from catching aflame or disintegrating the moment you submerge yourself.) Surprisingly, the energizer in this stage looks less like a volcano itself than the totem in The Arena, which leaves me to wonder if the developers straight-up mixed up which stages the two different sprites were supposed to appear in? In any case, destroying it here spawns a boss all the same — a grotesquely yellow abomination who attacks you with flame bolas and buzzsaws. Naturally, it dies just the same as any other boss after you hit it in the face a few times. Oddly, it explodes in a miniature mushroom cloud before melting into a puddle in its death FMV, as if the animators couldn’t decide which of the two demises would be more fitting for it.

At some point, I stopped noting when the bonus stages happen between levels here. I suppose that’s because by this point in the game, whatever bonuses you’re picking up during them don’t really matter much if you’re heading into a stage with less than a full stock of three lives, since you’re probably just gonna wind up having to use a continue and restart the level from scratch anyway. Case in point: ‘The Generator II’ has an identical layout to its previous incarnation, but the electrical rods feel like they’re a bit “zappier” when it comes to shocking you / quickly killing half the captive humans. Those’ll likely soften you up a fair bit before the boss shows up with their double health, and you’ll inevitably struggle to take it down with anything less than two and a half bars of Turbo. At the same time, it’s difficult to pretend there’s any real sense of stakes or urgency here when you know you have infinite tries at it, or to want to engage in a more cautious / protracted battle when you’ve already gone through nearly a dozen similar encounters in a row before it. Maybe you’d be more inclined to play safely / not rely on kamikaze tactics in a proper arcade environment paying 25¢ a pop, which Mazer was clearly designed for first and foremost. But with the theoretical dip switch set to “Free Play” for this home console version, there’s just no motivation to account for self-preservation: It feels like it’d be more rewarding to try and beat the game quickly than it would to try and beat it in one imaginary credit. I also struggle to picture how some of these bosses are even possible to survive without burning through lives [or bringing in a second player], which feels fairly deliberate on American Laser Games’ part. Here’s a company which always prioritized profits-per-hour when it came to their arcade titles, and who sold operators on statistics for how many quarters the average player was likely to spend before walking away from one of their cabinets. Of course, this doesn’t make them especially unique or anything in the grand scheme of game manufacturers; but without the years spent developing their own home console titles and learning how to specifically appeal to that market, all they could do was fall back on their old design philosophies.

‘The Cyborgs’ represents another stage which tries to incorporate a unique mechanic: Calling on the game’s loose narrative, the Semag-Resal have by this point in the story seemed to perfect their models of weaponized cyborgs, and sicc them on you over the course of the level. Not only that, but you actually have an added impetus to save as many of the twelve humans trapped in stasis as you can manage; as after a period of time, they will be transformed into supercharged cyborgs with increased capacity for speed and damage — as if they have access to a limitless supply of Turbo power for themselves. You really don’t want to have to deal with these guys (and I do mean “guys” in this case, since all the captive humans across the game share the same digitized sprite of a man clad in white shirt and blue khakis), and so this is the rare stage where you’ll actually want to break from the standard approach in order to rescue as many as you can before launching your attack on the energizer. Of course, the boss you eventually face here is nothing special: Just another walking tank that behaves in the same ways as all its predecessors. Maybe they hit a little harder than some of the other bosses, even in its debut encounter here? But the real danger is in trying to deal with them while there are still Turbo-powered cyborgs on the prowl, since the mob will work to surround you and make it so that you get locked into an inescapable hit-stun state. As annoying as that situation might feel in the moment, it’s actually one of the only real tricks that Mazer has up its sleeve in terms of advanced enemy strategy, and so I honestly kind of welcome the change of pace here! It almost makes you wonder how the rest of the game would play if the captive humans in all the other stages were at risk of being weaponized, and if you had more motivation to liberate them before they got turned against you? I mean, Robotron: 2084 had the same idea thirteen years earlier; and as long as Mazer was already cribbing notes from it, American Laser Games might as well have gone all the way and applied the mechanic across the entire game.

I’m not sure if I really need to bother recapping ‘The Volcano II’ or ‘The Cyborgs II’ at this point, when they’re both just carbon copies of previous stages with slightly tougher bosses. So, let’s just skip directly to Mazer‘s final stage here: ‘The Showdown’ represents the culmination of all your efforts to this point — the final step in liberating Earth from Semag-Resal rule, as you dismantle the apparently sentient robot that serves as the very emblem of the alien menace. The map on which you battle is actually somewhat unique, as it spans two floors that you’ll have to Turbo jump between in order to reach the energizer at the top of the screen. Why couldn’t more stages incorporate platforming elements like this as a means of variety? Well, it might have something to do with an easily-triggered scaling glitch; where if you activate your shield at the peak of your jump between floors / with your sprite at its biggest, you can actually get it to stick in this enlarged state, where your sprite occupies as much as a full fifth of the screen real estate. There’s obviously no benefit to you in doing this, and it certainly doesn’t do the game’s presentation any favors; so naturally, I tried to do this as many times as possible, just to crack myself up. Moving right along, the basic enemies in this stage take on a sort of “flying saucer” design, and seem to take a couple more hits than the typical robot goon to fell. All the more reason to focus on the energizer first and foremost again, and spawn in the boss as quickly as you can. Doing so reveals the big bad that’s been built up over the course of the entire game: Another generic walking mech, who does nothing out of the ordinary when put up against all the bosses you’ve already faced thus far. The only real novelty here is the fact that spawning the boss will cause the top floor to descend until the map becomes a flat arena again, since I suppose it would’ve been too difficult to program a boss who could keep up with your jumping between two different elevations. All told, they go down in about as much time as it takes to blow up any of the second-stage variants of previous bosses, at which point you’ve successfully saved humankind and so on and so forth.

… Except, there’s a surprise twist! As revealed in a computer-animated cutscene, it turns out that the “sentient” robot isn’t self-aware at all: It’s actually a mech piloted by a Semag-Resal alien, who hops out of the wreckage looking like an extra-wrinkled Darkseid (who also happens to be wearing Wolverine’s claws at gauntlets). The little guy is honestly kind of adorable, in a hideously grotesque kind of way — kinda like a naked mole rat, dressed up in a cute little knitted hoodie. And so, you immediately transition into the game’s real final battle against him, where he effectively operates like a boss with endless Turbo meter — dashing across the screen at top speed, firing powerful projectiles, and using your own tactic of melee attack against you in order to knock you out with just one or two hits. Clearly, it makes for the toughest fight in the game, and I just don’t know how you’re expected to go toe-to-toe with him without burning through at least three lives worth of full Turbo meters — even with the benefit of a teammate taking turns taking the heat off you. I suppose it’s possible to use the back-and-forth bullying strategy I mentioned earlier to trap the poor alien in an inescapable stun loop, but this is exceedingly tricky to do when he’s capable of killing either one of you with a single blow while you both struggle to get him in position. Luckily, dying and continuing here starts you back at the point where the alien spawns in, rather than making you survive against the mech and his flying minions again first. If that were the case, I honestly don’t know if I could’ve beaten the game legitimately in my single-player runs.

With the Semag-Resal soldier taken down, you’re treated to an ending cinematic (🔊): The alien falls to the ground in a puddle of green blood, visibly on the verge of death. But before Earth’s hero can land a finishing blow, the villain dials something in on their wristband computer, and teleports away from the scene — leaving an ash imprint of their body on the ground. From here, we cut to a spaceship taking off from The Sand – presumably with the defeated alien onboard – before flying into space and fleeing our planet. The words “THE END” circle around the circumference of the Earth like a Universal Pictures movie intro, before the top half of a question mark appears using the planet as its bottom dot — leaving the door open for a ‘Mazer II’ that would never come to be. I suppose we’re meant to infer that with the Semag-Resal gone, all the rest of the robots and military infrastructure they left behind will fall in time, and humankind will be able to rebuild and recover from this whole invasion fiasco? From there, we as a species can get back to doing what we do best: Slowly destroying the planet on our own terms, thank you very much. The game itself certainly doesn’t provide any predictions or epilogue here, as it’s content to roll credits as quickly as it can and get the next player in line at the arcade to deposit their quarters. Oh, wait: Mazer never did make it to arcades, did it? Well, so much for that, then. As long as they weren’t having to rush players out the proverbial door here, the least that American Laser Games could’ve done is throw up a Mortal Kombat-style epilogue card at the end telling us what your character gets up to after having saved all mankind. I wanna hear about how Hawk goes on to establish a brutal dictatorship more despised than the alien rule he overturned, or how Freon goes on to shill her own brand of culinary flash-freezing apparatus on late night infomercials. Arashi can become a reclusive hermit waiting for the day his blade is needed again, while Azotar can trip and fall over his own whip and die having cracked his skull open. Happy endings all around!

But wait, there’s more! Let’s say you manage to beat the game with a second player on hand. After the credits roll, instead of being taken immediately to the high score table, the screen dims as you enter what appears to be a secret final stage! Is there some sort of Double Dragon-esque confrontation here between you and your partner to determine who the “real” winner is? Not quite: The screen actually just stays partially dimmed, as you inexplicably repeat the final boss battle against the Semag-Resal alien. Losing here just means getting to continue again and again until you prevail, all while the screen remains barely bright enough to make out what’s happening. Beat the alien, cut to the same ending as before [at roughly 50% of its intended brightness], and watch the credits roll one more time as the light returns to the screen. Finally, you’re given the chance to enter your initials on the high score table, as the game properly concludes as intended. So, just what the hell is up with this weird, tacked-on fight? I honestly couldn’t tell you for sure: My best guess is, two-player Mazer really does intend to cut to a final battle between you and your friend; but something went horribly wrong with the implementation here, and it instead cues up the same final stage as before — now with a bit of graphical corruption for good measure. Either that, or the game is supposed to end at the same point it does in single-player play; but something still went horribly wrong in the implementation anyway, leading to the broken final battle that plays out. Either way, someone screwed something up, and you’ll have to suffer this stumbling around in the dark if you want to enter your names on the high score table. A truly bizarre note to end on, but it’s like I said earlier: Mazer is truly chock-full of surprises.

Speaking of secrets and surprises, I’d be remiss not to address a handful of cheats that exist within Mazer before we offer a conclusion on it. In a four-page feature on the game in ‘3 For The 3DO Enthusiast’ magazine, they dedicate a full page to documenting a series of in-game codes (as well as how to access the service menu),^[16] which can be used to start stages with power-ups or gameplay modifiers in place. The trick is that they have to be entered during the brief intro animations to each stage, and that all the practical ones only seem to work once per playthrough; so you may want to save them for the final stretch of stages, where they’d come most in handy. Those “practical” ones are all stuff like an extended Turbo meter (A-C-C-A-B-B), starting with a charge of Super Shield (C-A-B-A-B), or instantly gaining your choice of Tri-Attack (B-A-C-C-B-A) or Rapid Fire (B-C-A-C-A-C). But the interesting ones are the gameplay modifiers: Entering “A-A-C-A-B” will launch you into a ‘Blood Feud’ match in two-player mode, where both players compete against each other in forty-five second “rounds” to deplete five of each other’s lives. (The inclusion of this feature is what leads me to believe that the two-player campaign is supposed to end in a similar sort of player-versus-player match-up.) And if a second player enters in the code “C-B-B-A-A-C” on their controller during a single-player game, they’ll join in on a ‘Be the Boss’ mode; where they begin by controlling one of the respawning drones in the stage, before steering the boss after the other player blows up the energizer. This is a genuinely novel little addition to the game (reminiscent of Perfect Dark’s ‘Counter-Operative’ mode), and gives you a sense for what a fleshed-out versus multiplayer mode in the game could’ve potentially looked like: Letting players choose between any of the boss robots from a select screen, and duking it out against each other in their choice of tileset. Unfortunately, in its limited implementation here in the arcade mode, it’s just a half-baked diversion: Finishing the stage you trigger it on won’t actually advance you into the next one, as you’ll just have to replay the same level again against a proper CPU-controlled boss in order to progress. (As the magazine says: “No cheesy cheating, unfortunately.”)

That just about covers all there is to Mazer. But we’re still left with a question unanswered: What’s with the use of the word “maze” in the game’s title, when there are absolutely no mazes to be seen in the game itself? Well, as it turns out, a promotional flyer for the unreleased arcade version of the game conveys the concept American Laser Games were apparently going for here: “The Action of a Fighting Game. The Strategy of a Maze Game. The Excitement of a Race Against Time, Space and Deadly Opponents!” So, there it is: We’re supposed to be getting all the “strategy” of a maze game here — all the memorizing of paths taken, avoiding enemies chasing you, and discovering where the exits are. To this claim, I can only call “bullshit,” since the bulk of stages either start off as or eventually devolve into open arenas [after knocking down all the intrusive walls]. I have to wonder if the game’s original design was different at an earlier stage of development? Maybe the walls weren’t always breakable, and you had to navigate your way through narrow halls on your route to the energizer? Maybe instead of fighting the bosses, you’d have to run all the way back to where you started the stage from before they catch up to you? That honestly wouldn’t have been too bad a way to handle it, assuming that each of the stages were still relatively compact, and that the enemies could be successfully programmed to negotiate their way through the mazes on their own. Hell, they could’ve made it so that some of the walls actually are secretly breakable, and can be used as shortcuts for those willing to put in the work of experimenting with them. There’s a lot of different ways the team at ALG could’ve gone with this concept, in order to present something more unique than the standard multidirectional shooter they ultimately delivered. But I suppose they determined at some point that going with a more typical / proven style of crowd-pleasing action game would have better odds of catching on in the market. While they might have well been right in that regard, where they failed was in the execution — in making it a stand-out title in a crowd of arcade-style shooter peers.

The sad thing is, there really was the potential here for American Laser Games to produce something kinda neat — maybe even genuinely novel for its genre. For as clear as it is that a ton of effort went into developing and fully realizing Mazer, it’s just as clear that those efforts were misguided or compromised in unfortunate ways. It seems like they shied away from concepts that would’ve challenged convention, or went on to implement them in half-baked ways that just don’t amount to anything meaningful from a player’s perspective. I keep coming back to this idea in my head that something happened during development that must’ve shaken the team’s confidence in their original vision — some sort of playtesting session gone horribly wrong, or furious feedback from a meddling producer. Realistically, it’s just as likely that we’re simply looking at an amateur team who didn’t yet have the experience to fully realize their initial scope, and who struggled to put together so much as the finished product they ultimately managed to deliver. There’s no knowing for sure — not until one of the developers decides to provide to the public their first-hand insight on the development of this thoroughly obscure title. (I personally made attempts to reach out to Darren Thorne and Nathanael Brown in the process of writing this article, but didn’t get a response back in time for me to incorporate it into my writing here. If I ever do hear back from either of them, we’ll try to arrange for a proper interview, and maybe come back to update this article with some of the insights provided. — Cass.) For now, all we can do is guess at the circumstances, and judge the game on its own terms. On that note: Would it surprise any of you to hear that I don’t actually hate Mazer, in spite of everything I’ve said about it ’til now?

Yeah, it’s as basic as can be, it’s not particularly well-constructed, and it doesn’t really have much in the way of replay value by my books. (That said, I did wind up having to play through it five times for this article, so maybe I’m extra burned out on it.) Also, you can beat the whole thing in just under thirty minutes with the benefit of its infinite continues, and I’m not sure if I’d be all too satisfied with that if I’d paid a full $64.95 for it back in the day? For reference, that’d be the rough equivalent of $125 USD adjusted for current inflation. Now, I’m not usually one for the ol’ “time-value proposition,” but hot damn if a fresh copy of Mazer didn’t cost you a pretty penny for not having all that much content on offer. And that price for a ticket to play is on top of your initial $699.99 entry fee to the console itself! But I digress: The point I was trying to make is that Mazer was definitely better suited for the arcades than the home console, where you’d have to try pretty hard to blow that kind of money on it in a single trip. So, if we try to pretend like a fistful of quarters was all it took to clear the game, it turns out it’s a lot easier to be generous to it: It mostly functions well enough, dresses up its stages well enough to keep the screen from feeling static, and really isn’t too unfair with regards to its difficulty. Sure, it could stand to have a bit more variety, but at least it doesn’t overstay its welcome to where it gets to be too monotonous. (Granted, we’re still imagining it as an arcade game here, where brevity can be something to be appreciated.) All that being said, I reckon that attacking Mazer with a second player in tow is absolutely the way it’s meant to be played — working together to cheese the bosses, carefully coordinating how to not accidentally shoot each other, and sharing a laugh over some of the goofier-looking graphics. Luckily, those multiplayer features all translate just as well from the arcade to the home console experience; so if you’re intending to take on Mazer for yourself, I highly recommend doing so with a buddy on hand. Best of luck actually selling them on the idea of it.

That isn’t to say that there’s not fun to be had playing the game solo, if a party of one is all you can manage. I think the moment when Mazer managed to win me over came around mid-way through my second playthrough — playing as Freon, down to a tic of health, and trying to see if my stupid freeze ability would work on the boss while running around the revolving walls in The Arena II. The game is honestly at its best when there are still obstacles left in the stage that you can catch enemies on, while you still have the ability to establish a bit of distance between yourself and the bots. My earlier point about how Mazer should’ve actually leaned more into maze game elements stands here, in defiance of every opinion I typically hold with regards to the sub-genre. I can imagine having to keep routes of escape in the back of my mind, or potentially setting up traps for the enemies by predicting which halls they’re likely to travel down in pursuit of me; and to my own surprise, those ideas actually sound pretty fun to me! Toss in a time limit on the stages to keep players from playing too passively, maybe allow shields and Turbo meter to slowly regenerate over time / while not engaged in combat, and rebalance the game around finding brief moments of regenerative respite in relatively safe corners. There’d be a lot of kinks for the developers to work out in approaching this sort of radical redesign, and maybe they wouldn’t have stuck the landing, but at least they’d be offering something novel with a take on hybrid maze-shooter gameplay. Alternatively – if we’re just sticking with the more action-oriented open-stage design they ultimately went with – every stage should’ve at least had a handful of permanent fortifications that the enemies can’t shoot their way through. This one tweak would give the game so much more depth of play, in opening up the options for a player to use them as cover or to create space between enemies.

Even if Mazer managed to endear itself to me personally, it’s still not hard to understand why it went on to be critically lambasted back in 1995: As a home console title, it just doesn’t offer enough in the way of value for its decidedly steep MSRP. From a mechanical perspective, the controls can feel a bit lacking at times (particularly in dodging attacks, maintaining strafing, and activating special abilities), and the camera’s constant zooming in and out can make reading the stages genuinely difficult in some cases. And with regards to presentation, Mazer doesn’t stack up to the standard of technical proficiency that had come to be expected on the 3DO; as its animations are all somewhat choppy, its 2D sprites lack in any smoothing around their pixelated edges, and as it barely manages to maintain a consistent 15 frames per second during gameplay. (Critics seemed more willing to forgive lower framerates in the case of fully 3D titles for the system, but not so much in the case of bitmap-driven affairs.) At a moment in time where the 3DO was still desperate to fill out its library with entries to cover all the established genres, Mazer was one of the first titles on the console to represent the multidirectional shooter, and there was an anticipation attached to it that it might do the platform proud in providing an exciting exclusive. So, when American Laser Games only had this to show for their efforts, the disappointment hit folk that much harder. What’s even worse for ALG is the fact that Studio 3DO would launch Captain Quazar just a few months later — their own attempt at tackling the genre, with far more in the way of features and polish. And from that moment forward, Mazer became little more than a bad memory in the minds of most. Sure, the game may have managed to attract a few fans who admire it for its straightforward simplicity and minimal-frills action, but you can’t really blame the larger majority for ignoring / outright rejecting it: There’s nothing that Mazer does that other shooters hadn’t already done better by ’95.

Still, just because a game isn’t particularly unique doesn’t necessarily make it bad: It’s all the other stuff about Mazer that makes it bad; between the laughable visuals, repetitive gameplay, glut of completely useless mechanics, and the total lack of consideration for the home console audience. The fact that it’s not entirely unplayable is just about the lowest bar it should have to clear, and it just barely manages the feat. But by god, the team at American Laser Games sure poured everything they had into it: They really did their damnedest to try and do something special here, possibly even knowing it was a doomed prospect from the start. And against all odds, they managed to turn out something that’s… well, still not quite up to par, if we’re being totally honest. But boy howdy, they sure gave it the ol’ college try! It’s obvious there was a genuine ambition behind their designs here — a hunger to prove themselves, and to save their struggling company in the process. You can see the seeds of solid ideas strewn throughout Mazer – not quite flashes of “brilliance,” mind you, but serviceable concepts at the very least – and you have to wonder what those kernels might’ve grown into if the developers had been given the proper time and resources to cultivate them. Could they have flourished into something truly special? That big question mark at the end of the final cutscene – as comically cliché as it may well be – stands as the symbol of ALG’s unrealized potential: Their shared hope that they might get another shot at better realizing Mazer’s formula, and maybe deliver something closer to the sort of game they had originally imagined. Of course, they’d never actually wind up getting that chance, because no one in their right mind would greenlight a sequel to such an underwhelming title. Especially not when the entire studio was sinking fast, and every attempt at bailing themselves out just sprung new leaks for them to have to deal with. So, y’know: Maybe going with that question mark at the end wasn’t such a good call after all?

“Destroy the Sentient ‘Boss’ Robot.”

“Rescuing Earthlings from the aliens
and cyborg slavery.”
Promotional flyer for Mazer’s unreleased
arcade conversion.

In weighing in on Mazer, reviewers of the era pulled no punches. Many of them had a bone to pick with American Laser Games for what they saw as a flood of conversions of their FMV arcade games to home consoles, and seemed to take a sort of pleasure in mocking them for their pivot into more traditional fare — in pointing out how they had pumped out largely interchangeable lightgun titles for a number of years, and using Mazer as a case to contend that they didn’t have the know-how to develop any other sort of game. Take NEXT Generation’s one-star [out of five] review of the game, for example: “We sincerely apologize to American Laser Games for giving it a rough time about continually producing the same title over and over. […] Hey folks, light gun games are fine by us, OK? Really. But just promise to never, ever put us through the kind of pain we went through in our attempt to ‘play’ Mazer. A 3/4-view isometric shooter of the worst sort using tiny, digitized characters, this title gives the most frustrating gaming experience you can remember. Controls refuse to respond, enemies refuse to keep coming, objectives are obscure at best, and to top it off, the view keeps zooming in and out, apparently at random, so you’re never quite sure what’s around you. […] The CD might be suitable for use as a coaster, but that’s about it.”^[17] On the other hand, there were reviewers who seemed happy to see ALG breaking from their typical format, even if the immediate results weren’t necessarily up to par. Jason D’Aprile for ‘3 For the 3DO Enthusiast’ held a hope that ALG would continue down this path, and eventually endeavor to get better at it: “There is currently no alternative to Mazer on the 3DO, which, for fans of these games (like myself), is unfortunate, but it does make Mazer a bit more compulsive to play. Of course, there will supposedly be a true Contra clone released sometime soon and Studio 3DO does have Captain Quazar coming down the pike as well. The good graphics and sound, multiple character selection, two player option and mindless action nature of the game are definitely Mazer’s strong points. […] The control appears sloppy more often than not and that made Mazer even more trying. Overall, American Laser Games may very well have a bright future as they branch away from their traditional live action gun games, but Mazer could have used more care.”^[16b]

That last review briefly touches on something I didn’t expect to see in any contemporary reviews: Praise for Mazer‘s graphics! And here I had just assumed that everyone would’ve highlighted them as a negative rather than a positive. It turns out that I’m still partially right, though: What ends up happening across several reviews is that folk are taken in by the presentation at first, but quickly turn against it when they see how it affects their ability to actually play the game. Such is the case in Stuart Spencer Wyne’s one out of five star review for 3DO Magazine: “Watch someone else play Mazer and you can see what the developers dreamt of. Rather than cute cartoony sprites, digitised actors and CGI-rendered enemies. Rather than a fixed perspective, a shifting view which zooms in or out to keep track of two-player action. Rather than a slideshow of cartoony graphics, an epic FMV intro… […] The problem with Mazer is, simply, gameplay. One of the main attractions of Gauntlet games is the huge sprawling mazes which players can enjoy exploring. Mazer’s title suggests the developers once knew this, but as the main levels in Mazer consist of a single room with a few, destructible walls it seems funds ran out before they could implement it. […] Focus in during gameplay and the brash graphics merge together into a Rorschach inkblot test. If you concentrate, you can win through – but it’s an ordeal rather than a pleasure. Time after time, people who’d been stopped in their tracks by Mazer’s visuals would wander away in utter disappointment after playing it. ‘I hope you give it a really stinging review,’ was one of the more printable comments.”^[18] Others still believed the graphics during gameplay to be decent enough, but drew the line at the CGI cutscenes apparently not being up to par; including ‘The Outlaw’ writing on behalf of GamePro, in their 3.5 [out of 5]-scoring review: “Mazer is a frustratingly addictive game that alternately makes you want to cheer in triumph and stomp your 3DO to pieces. […] Decent controls allow you to run through each level quickly. Occasionally, however, you get stuck between items, and become easy target prey. The digitized graphics generally look good, but the scenes of the bosses blowing up are ridiculous. After intriguing opening voice clips, the sound does little to draw you in. While hardly amazing, Mazer has its moments. It’ll satisfy most 3DO owners who’ve been thirsting for a little action.”^[19]

And then there were reviewers who actually seemed satisfied with how Mazer turned out. Naturally, there weren’t too many folk in this camp, and none of them went on to rate the game any higher than the equivalent of a 70%. In fact, let’s just go ahead and highlight the game’s highest-scoring review right here: A 7 out of 10 from The Electric Playground’s Victor Lucas: “Wow, this is an American Laser Games game? What a change! There is no light gun required with this one and it’s not a full motion video game. (No bad acting!!!!) Could this be a sign of things to come from ALG in the future? They are scheduled to start releasing games for the Playstation and the Saturn, after all. (More on what came of those games later. — Cass) Well, let’s hope that they continue down this new stretch of road they’re on, because with Mazer, ALG has produced a very enjoyable little excursion. Especially for fans of Berserk, Robotron and Smash TV, three of my personal all time favourites.”^[20] That’s the entirety of Lucas’ written review, by the way. I guess brevity really is the soul of wit, huh? In any event, a small handful of slightly positive reviews wasn’t enough to offset the fact that the 3DO-centric magazines – the ones that a 3DO owner were most likely to read – had gone ahead and penned less-than flattering takes on Mazer; which pretty much spelled disaster for the game, if it couldn’t even get those publications to side with it. As for whatever business relationship existed between ALG and The 3DO Company, the latter certainly seemed content to let the former flounder, even in a case where their success would’ve meant putting more 3DO hardware in arcades. Remember that Mazer was still slated to make its way to the CD ROM System for a time, and that establishing a proper foothold in that market would’ve potentially made for a relatively hands-off revenue stream [on 3DO’s end]. You have to wonder if the company thought that the idea of Mazer / ALG “representing” their line of hardware might do more harm than good — damage their reputation instead of helping to bolster it? In either case, The 3DO Company left the game and its developer to fend for themselves in the market, where they met with the results you’d expect.

Sales numbers for 3DO titles are hard to track down, especially in the cases of games that weren’t advertised heavily and/or promoted directly by The 3DO Company themselves. The impression that I get is that the most profitable titles might’ve moved upwards of a couple hundred thousand units; such as Gex managing the rare feat of over 500K copies sold (the most ever seen on the console), FIFA International Soccer coming in at an estimated 400K, or Super Street Fighter II Turbo sales reaching as high as 313K.** But success stories like those seemed fairly rare: Most publishers would’ve been lucky to land sales somewhere in the tens of thousands, and barely see a return on their investment in the process. You’ve gotta remember that the 3DO never got to enjoy a profit in the market, and that most publishers who aligned themselves with it suffered financially for doing so. Which brings us to the case of Mazer, where the only hint we have as to how well / poorly it might’ve performed comes from Robert Grebe, who spoke bluntly on the state of American Laser Games’ operations in a post-arcade market: “The last products that we had that had any traction were the full motion video games; like Fast Draw Showdown or, perhaps, Shootout at Old Tucson. […] The games business is tough, and once we lost the leg of the arcade games, that put us on pretty tenuous footing.”^[9d] I’d take all this to mean that Mazer probably didn’t do so hot in the market — guesstimate that it probably sold somewhere in the lower end of four figures, judging from what’d generally constitute as a flop for the 3DO. Potentially due to its lukewarm reception on the console – or perhaps simply owing to American Laser Games’ perilous financial situation – Mazer never made its way to the CD ROM System in arcades. As far as I can gather, that makes for a grand total of three titles that were ever made available for ALG’s interchangeable cabinet system: Mad Dog II, Orbatak, and Shootout at Old Tucson.

Needless to say, the value proposition that American Laser Games had sold arcade operators on was never fully realized with the CD ROM System, and they failed to save the market with their revolutionary concept… Though, if you really think about it, their idea wasn’t really all that unique in the first place: Nintendo had already broken ground on the concept way back in 1986 with their ‘PlayChoice’ systems housing up to ten titles at a time, while SNK’s ‘Neo Geo MVS (Multiple Video System)’ cabinets had made installing new games as simple as adding a cartridge to a six-slot rack. As far as I can tell, ALG’s system would’ve only been able to run a single game at a time; since their disc system didn’t seem capable of rotating through a selection of titles, and each game would’ve required completely different input devices to be installed in the machine in order to accommodate them. With that in mind, what was supposed to be the advantage here over traditional arcade conversion kits? If an operator still had to open up their cabinet and take the time to swap out entire panels for different types of controllers – before further changing out all the marquee and side panel art – where’s the time they’re supposedly meant to be saving here? Advertising the game-swapping functionality of the CD ROM System as being “easy as swapping out your jukebox CDs” was either a misguided claim at best, or downright deceptive at worst. The end result was the same in either case: Most sensible operators didn’t buy into the bullshit ALG was peddling, and the small handful of suckers who did got promptly burned for it. And with that, the company had effectively made themselves persona non grata in the arcade market — burned the last of whatever good will they may have had left with operators and distributors. (Not that it would’ve mattered much, since the entire market was going through hard times at this point anyway.)

It should come as no surprise that American Laser Games dissolved their arcade division completely near the end of 1995 — around the same time they shuttered Quantum Quality Productions, incidentally.^[14b] In a press release to 3DO Magazine, Robert Grebe confided in them the following: “This is a significant and painful change. We enjoyed many years of success and prosperity in the arcade business, but the arcade market has been in a downward spiral since March, 1994, and there’s no end in sight. We are now directing all of our efforts into creating CD-ROM software for the robust home entertainment market in PCs and game platforms.”^[21] News of this change in structure came paired with the disclosure that nine employees had been laid off from the company, likely comprising film production crew members whose services were no longer needed. Not too long after that, Grebe himself stepped away from ALG at the behest of “venture capital partners that [he] had at that time”; which I would take to mean that he was advised to get off the ship before it sank, so that his reputation in business wouldn’t sink with it.^[9e] (Remember folks: No one can blame you for a company going under so long as you resign before it folds!) As if all that weren’t bad enough for ALG, the horse they had backed in the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer was effectively dead in the water by this point too: All the licensed manufacturers of the console hardware would stop producing new systems in early 1996, having gotten sick of taking $100 losses with every unit sold.^[22] And when The 3DO Company itself announced later that year that they no longer intended to develop new software to support their flagship machine, there could be no doubt that the platform was well and truly done for.^[23] For ALG, this meant having to quickly train their staff on the intricacies of developing for new hardware; specifically, the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn.

They started by ordering something like a “practice run” with a conversion job bringing Crime Patrol to Sega’s machine, but this ultimately missed a December 1996 launch window / never materialized as a retail product.^[24] (There is a playable prototype out in the wild, though.) Neither did their last attempt at producing an original title: The tentatively-titled ‘Shining Sword’ for the PlayStation — meant to serve as a fully 3D fantasy epic, from the looks of a handful of target renders sent to gaming magazines of the era. According to testimony by Darren Thorne (posted to his own Wikipedia account’s user talk page) though, progress on developing the game had been delayed by multiple reimaginings of its design mid-production, and the final product would’ve likely been pretty uninspired anyway by his own estimation: “There was a really long drawn out story that was full of every dungeons and dragon style cliche you can imagine. We had concept art for most of the main characters and first pass 3d models of all of them. […] To be honest, I think the game was never really a game, it was a bunch of ideas kind of stuck together and it suffered through a lot of rehashings. It was extremely derivative of other games, and wholly unoriginal. […] In my opinion, Shining sword was more style than substance, and really never developed much style either.” Now, you’d think that the studio would be desperate to put anything out at this point – regardless as to whether or not it was particularly original – if only so that they could have something on store shelves available for the new consoles. But alas, it wasn’t meant to be for ALG: The fact of the matter is that the company had been hemorrhaging money since 1994, and that Shining Sword (or any other individual title, for that matter) wasn’t gonna stanch that bleeding.

At the height of their success, American Laser Games were poised to become a publicly traded company; boasting an evaluation of between $40 and $50 million dollars, and predicted to raise $20 million in funding.^[9f] But just before they were about to launch their offering, the arcade market collapsed from under them, and their evaluation quickly plummeted with it. 1995 had seen them pull in just $16 million in revenue for the year, and analysts projected that they’d see just half that sum (roughly $8 million) in 1996.^[24b] There was simply no confidence in ALG’s newly-established console games division to turn around such significant year-over-year losses, and so they decided not to even try. Instead, they redirected all of their resources and remaining staff to their one division that had actually proven profitable in the past year: Their ‘HeR Interactive’ label, specializing in PC titles for teenage girls. So, remember way back at the beginning of this article when I said that Robert Grebe’s wife Patricia would “eventually establish a spin-off software house of her own?” That wound up becoming HeR Interactive (after a brief period of branding as ‘Games For Her Interactive’), with its having been established in 1994 in order to facilitate production of their debut title — 1995’s McKenzie & Co. See, Patricia Flanigan (at some point having dropped her ex-husband’s surname) had the crazy idea that girls might enjoy video games too, if the industry could just get over its fixation with advertising almost exclusively to the male demographic. Her solution, then, was to go in the complete opposite direction: To embrace a “gender-biased” approach, and “create a ‘girls’ niche’ in the software market.”^[25] In other words, they wound up leaning all the way into traditional “girly” stereotypes; as it was still Patricia’s belief that “girls just don’t like – or don’t feel comfortable with – computers,” and that they were going to have to take a broad approach in introducing girls to the very concept of playing video games.

“He’s got the most beautiful horse. You should see him go riding!”
Magazine advertisement for McKenzie & Co.

With this in mind, McKenzie & Co. serves as pretty much what you’d expect: A prototypical dating sim, centering on a friend group of boy-obsessed high school girls and your mission to find a date for the prom. You pick one of two girls to play as (Carly or Kim), who each have their pick of two potential beaus (three apiece with an expansion pack released later) that you’ll work to endear yourself to over the course of a brief scenario. Between live-action FMV cutscenes depicting your interactions with the boys (this is an American Laser Games co-production, after all), you’ll be able to choose between different dialogue options in conversations; which may elicit different responses in the moment, but ultimately all seem to steer you toward the same guy-specific endings. When you’re not chasing after the hunks, you can play janky minigames representing school subjects or working a part-time job, as well as spending money on a sizable assortment of clothing options at the mall. Also be prepared to constantly swap between the five CD-ROMs that the game spans, seeing as the HeR Interactive team did a truly awful job in divvying their assets between the discs. All told, McKenzie & Co. is pretty dire from a gameplay perspective: It severely underestimates the competency of its players in engaging with it, and underdelivers on the content that’d be genuinely appealing to its intended demographic; namely, the interactions between characters, and the range of conversation choices you’re offered in personifying your chosen girl. At the same time, there’s a “90s kitsch” factor here that lends the game a certain charm, and there’s just an infectious innocence / optimism to it all that makes it hard to get mad at McKenzie & Co. — in spite of how misguided it may be in everything it seems to stand for. Plus, one of the guys you can swoon over is a shy cowboy, who winds up writing and performing a song for you on acoustic guitar. Needless to say, I’m now “Team Derrick” for life.

To HeR Interactive’s credit, they seemed to make a genuine effort in developing McKenzie & Co. around input and feedback from their target demographic: Patricia reached out to an Albuquerque school district in order to conduct surveys and interviews with school-aged girls, as well as recruiting them as playtesters during development.^[26] And for their efforts in producing a game aimed at a then-underrepresented demographic, they were met with rounds of rejection from every major publisher of the era — were apparently told straight-up that “girls don’t play games,” and that all their work had been a waste of time. And so, they ultimately wound up self-publishing the game, and reaping all the profits made from its 80,000 copies sold for themselves. McKenzie & Co. would rate as a modest success for the label, which actually qualified it as the most profitable venture American Laser Games had seen in years. And then a year later (in November of 1996), Mattel Media would publish Barbie Fashion Designer for PC and Mac, and sell through a staggering 600 thousand units in its first year alone; thereby proving the viability of advertising video games to girls, and empowering HeR Interactive to continue in their own pursuit of that market share.

It bears noting that HeR Interactive’s development team was basically held together by one employee, by the way: One Sheri Graner Ray — formerly of Origin Systems, and largely responsible for the creative directions of Ultima VII & VIII. On her first day of work at ALG / HeR, she was “handed a big box with about 10 reels of shot movie film and a big three ring binder with a shooting script in it,” and told by her boss (Patricia) that she “needed to make a game out of it” in just three months time.^[27] Sheri’s descriptions of her time at HeR Interactive are downright nightmarish, and make it out to be one of the most dysfunctional development studios that has ever existed — as run by one of the most emotionally unstable individuals to ever take up the role of an executive. In example: In the span of just one 24-hour period, Patricia would call Sheri an “egotistical bitch” in front of her team, and then accuse her of trying to “steal her company […] and her husband from her too” over a phone call; before later apologizing for being “such a bitch to work with,” and scheduling an appointment for her with a massage therapist as an attempt at a make-good. Now, imagine having to put up with that sort of drama every day you go to work; and at the same time, being made to work in a constant state of crunch over the course of an entire year. I can’t cover every horrid detail of the HeR Interactive workplace here, but I highly encourage y’all to read Sheri’s testimonies for yourself.

Getting back on track here: With HeR Interactive proving to be the only valuable asset that American Laser Games had going for it (however dysfunctional it may have been behind the scenes), the decision was eventually made to spin it off into its own company toward the end of 1996. Naturally, this decision only came after ALG itself had proven absolutely unsalvageable as a brand, and after having laid off 80% of its workforce in one of the most despicable ways I’ve ever heard detailed: “Apparently the execs arrived early and put empty cardboard boxes into the cubicles of the people who were going to be laid off. They then stood outside the door of the building and wouldn’t let anyone in until everyone in the department had arrived. They then told them to go in and if they had boxes in their cube, to please pack up their stuff.”^[28] This should probably go without saying at this point, but the post-Grebe administration at ALG all sound like a bunch of goddamned scumbags, and it’s no surprise that they wound up running the company into the ground. And run it into the ground they did, as ALG was eventually made to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in late 1996; finally putting Shining Sword out of its misery, and putting dozens more out of work. But HeR Interactive lived on, and later went on to buy up the remaining assets of ALG in 1999 — taking ownership over the rights to their arcade titles, and proceeding to bid them off just a year later. We’ll get back to that matter in just a bit: In the meantime, it’s worth covering a bit more of the HeR Interactive story, since they effectively served as a continuation of / successor to ALG’s operations for a period of time.

HeR Interactive’s second title (not counting the McKenzie & Co. expansion pack) would be 1996’s The Vampire Diaries, based on the original L.J. Smith series of young adult novels. If you want a sense of what that game was all about, I’ll recommend this video on the subject by the YouTuber ‘Grim Beard’ (🎥). At a point during Vampire Diaries’ production, Patricia Flanigan exited the company (and the games industry as a whole, evidently), marking the last of American Laser Games’ original founding members to move on from the enterprise. A new CEO by the name of Jan Eric Claesson was installed, who Sheri initially describes as “a former Microsoftie” (having served in executive roles at Microsoft between 1985 and 1996) and later as a gigantic asshole who seemed to delight in verbally abusing her and the rest of his staff.^[29][30] He eventually managed to psychologically torture Sheri into quitting HeR Interactive – having done “everything [he] could to break her” by his own confession to her husband-to-be Tim Ray (then a programmer at ALG / HeR) – but not before she pitched an idea that would sustain the company for the next two-and-a-half decades to follow: Adapting the Nancy Drew series of mystery novels into point-and-click adventure games, using the same gameplay systems developed for The Vampire Diaries. And so, the ‘Nancy Drew Adventure’ franchise was born, beginning with 1998’s Nancy Drew: Secrets Can Kill. These titles proved a lucrative venture for HeR Interactive, and soon became an annual affair for the company, who released no less than 35 titles in the series between 1998 and 2015. By measure of an estimate in 2006, the franchise had managed cumulative sales to the tune of 2.1 million copies in North America alone,^[31] which surely means that they’ve since tripled [or even quadrupled] that sum in the fifteen years to follow.

But it hasn’t just been sunshine and stability for HeR Interactive since lucking into the Nancy Drew license: Claesson would eventually depart from the company in around 2011, leading to a briefly revolving door of CEOs between then and 2014; until one Penny Milliken stepped into the role, in which they remain to this day (as of the time of this writing). And unfortunately, her tenure has gone on to coincide with one of the most tumultuous periods in the company’s history. The problems seem to center around a game by the name of Nancy Drew: Midnight in Salem, which had initially been slated for a late 2015 launch window. But in May of that year, the company announced a round of lay-offs^[32] – speculated to comprise more than half their staff – which led to four years worth of delays on the title, and put an end to the days of their consistent release schedule. HeR Interactive would wind up having to outsource development to a number of external studios (including Mi’pu’mi Games, Toy Box Entertainment, and the Talespinners writing service), replacing the long-time voice actress for Nancy Drew (Lani Minella), and ultimately launching the game in an arguably unfinished state; including numerous grammatical and spelling errors in its captioning, items disappearing from your inventory before they’re intended to [thereby breaking the game], and some noticeably rough-looking visual effects throughout which just make the whole thing look low-rent. Needless to say, Midnight in Salem was not well-received by critics or long-time fans of the series, and HeR Interactive hasn’t so much as announced any upcoming titles since 2019. At this point in time, it’s unknown if they even have any dedicated developers left on staff, and it’s looking less likely by the day that they’ll ever put out a new game again. An unceremonious end to the digital adventures of Nancy Drew, to be sure.

Getting back to the American Laser Games brand: As mentioned earlier, HeR Interactive had gone on to acquire the company they had originally spun off from, and promptly sold off those assets in the year 2000. The interested party was Canadian publisher Digital Leisure, who had formed in 1997 with the intent of buying up the rights to as many FMV / LaserDisc titles as they could afford, in order to re-release them across as many different formats as were available to them. They first started by getting their hands on the Don Bluth games library (the so-called ‘Dragon’s Lair Trilogy,’ comprising both Dragon’s Lair games and Space Ace), and have since proceeded to publish “updated” versions of it across the Nintendo Wii, Switch, and DSi; as well as for Windows computers, Android and iOS devices, and the PlayStation Network… not to mention DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray players. Basically, whenever a device capable of video playback hits the market, Digital Leisure will inevitably wind up releasing a conversion of Dragon’s Lair for it. (Forget all about “Can it Run DOOM?”, and start asking “Can it Run Dragon’s Lair?”) Naturally, Digital Leisure’s acquisition of the American Laser Games catalogue has meant that conversions of some of those titles have been released multiple times over in the last few years — in particular, Mad Dog McCree, which has gone on to see versions issued across no less than six different consoles. At least you can say that these games have been safely preserved for future generations to enjoy, without the technical compromises seen in ALG’s originally ordered console conversions from the 1990s.

… Only, it took Digital Leisure some time to figure out how to put out decent conversions of these seemingly simple games. Because when they first started pumping these American Laser Games reissues out, boy howdy, they were rough as guts. See, the pre-eminent technology for putting video on a disc back in the early aughts were still DVDs, which gave Digital Leisure a truly terrible idea: Releasing these titles as “DVD video games” — as in, games meant to be played on consumer models of DVD player. This meant expecting players to aim their guns by pressing the menu navigation buttons on their television remotes, and slowly moving an on-screen crosshair across a limited grid of potential target zones. After all, it wasn’t like they could pair these bare-bones DVD releases with proper lightgun peripherals, if such a technical feat / input device was even possible given the format. Not only that, but these DVD versions of the games didn’t come with anything in the way of HUD elements; or any other means of indicating player lives, score, and ammo count. And so, these games are just completely devoid of those basic mechanics, and are left to play out as watching scenes on loop until you successfully steer the cumbersome crosshair. Bearing that in mind, the Digital Leisure team would strip out a number of original scenes from the games that would’ve proved potentially difficult for players to clear, such as Mad Dog McCree’s showdown encounters. This is all on top of the fact that DVD players would often stutter or delay as it attempted to cue up new scenes, making for a thoroughly unpleasant playing experience through and through. Honestly, there’s an argument to be made here that players would’ve been better off tracking down the old 3DO / Sega CD copies of these games, for as heavily compromised as these DVD releases wound up being. Of course, that didn’t stop Digital Leisure from attempting to peddle them as being “PS2 and Xbox compatible” (owing to the DVD playback functionalities seen on those consoles), and sullying the reputations of these titles in the minds of hapless casual consumers.

“Nice shootin’! Try another one.”
DVD cover for Mad Dog McCree.

Luckily, Digital Leisure would improve on their craft with time, and take advantage of the advents of new technologies: When DVD-ROM drives started to become a standard feature of personal computers (circa 2002), they began releasing their software there, now with bare-bones UIs and the benefit of mouse aiming. Then came the Nintendo Wii, where the studio realized that the system’s motion controllers could be used as impromptu lightguns, and prompted them to start putting work in on making their games look more presentable for the console. When Nintendo later went and launched their DSi Shop, the system’s touchscreen and stylus was deemed to be an appropriate analog for Mad Dog McCree‘s six-shooter. Soon after Sony started selling their line of ‘Move’ motion controllers for the PlayStation 3, Digital Leisure got to work putting their titles up for sale on the PlayStation Network, presenting the American Laser Games catalogue in the most pristine quality seen since the original LaserDisc arcade releases. And most recently, the Nintendo 3DS was made to serve as a platform for these now thirty year-old shooters, for those who want to take a slice of the Wild West with them wherever they may roam. You can probably make the argument that Digital Leisure went and oversaturated the market with this endless series of re-releases, much the same as ALG did by churning out so many cabinets back in the day. But at least they’ve endeavored to go “all digital” with them in the last decade, so as not to litter store shelves and bargain bins with their wares. Of course, the dilemma now is that most of these downloadable releases are no longer available for sale, seeing as several of the marketplaces that offered them have since shut down. It probably won’t be too long though before they make their way to something like the Nintendo Switch, or maybe re-appear in the form of a compilation pack on Steam.

If you’re looking to play through the American Laser Games FMV catalogue for yourself, your options for doing so legally are somewhat limited at the moment: There’s the version of Mad Dog McCree that’s currently still up on the 3DS Shop, but it hardly seems like an ideal way to experience that game. You can technically still buy Fast Draw Showdown on the PS3’s PlayStation Network, but it’s become a cumbersome process since Sony limited means of making purchases through the service — not to mention the fact that you’d need a set of PlayStation Move controllers to properly play it. That leaves tracking down used copies of the Mad Dog McCree Gunslinger Pack’s physical release on Wii (which can go for frankly ridiculous prices of $50 USD or higher), or torturing yourself with the original DVD video releases. And frankly, these games just aren’t worth the hassle of hunting down at this point, or the suffering that comes from trying to slog through them with a television remote in hand. If you want to experience these games in something approximating “the way they were meant to be played,” your best bets would either be loading up the Wii releases on a softmodded console / the Dolphin emulator, or finding a compilation of the original Amiga ROMs with video files to pair. That latter option comes the most highly recommended by me, as it serves to preserve and present the games as authentically as possible, as well as covering some of the games that Digital Leisure never got around to re-releasing on modern consoles [such as Gallagher’s Gallery]. And if you happen to have something like a PC-compatible lightgun device (or even just a Wiimote paired via Bluetooth made to steer your cursor), you can ditch the mouse and get up to some proper shooting action.

So, we’ve covered all the pertinent history of American Laser Games by this point, but I don’t feel like we’ve directly answered the biggest question yet: What killed the company? Was it the crashing of the arcade market, and ALG’s inability to pivot in time? Did it come down to gross mismanagement and bad financial bets? Or was it simply a matter of the quality of their output not being where it needed to be, and the natural selection of the games business? Of course, all of these points are certainly contributing factors to their demise, and so it doesn’t seem reasonable to declare a singular “cause of death” in this instance… unless you’re someone like a Robert Grebe or Darren Thorne, who have attempted to attribute ALG’s collapse to specific issues in the years since. We’ll start with Thorne’s rather succinct take on the situation, which he posted to his Wikipedia user talk page in May of 2017: “When the company was restructured into ‘Her Interactive’, I and some others were laid off. […] The girl game concept doomed the company to closure.” Now, I’ve gotta take issue with this particular perspective on the situation, since it just doesn’t make any sense to me: HeR Interactive and their line of girl games was the only financially tenable prospect ALG had on hand by the mid-90s — just about the only chance they had at keeping the company afloat. No disrespect to the work Darren put in, but it was clear that none of the titles they’d helped produce for the CD ROM System and/or 3DO were gonna break through and prove to be the salvation for the studio. Even with their planned moves to the PlayStation and Saturn, ALG would’ve had to actually have compelling games on offer if they wanted to establish a foothold in that console generation. And by Darren’s own admission, Shining Sword certainly wasn’t shaping up to be anything special — something with the potential to turn things around. All I’m saying is, it’s hard to blame ALG for going all-in on the first profitable turn they’d seen in years, and to scrap everything else that had been causing them consistent losses.

Which brings us to Grebe’s perspective on American Laser Games’ collapse, which is at least a bit more measured and self-reflective: “The demise of American Laser Games came from the collapse of the arcade video game market; certainly nothing that we controlled. We were working to produce home games, and we could probably have gotten started on that a little earlier. […] In the end we just couldn’t produce at the level of some of the big houses, like Electronic Arts, Sony, & Sega, who were much better financed and had a much greater well of creative talents than what we had.”^[9g] So, Robert is keen to blame the collapse of the arcade market here, and admit to the fact that they could’ve afforded to pivot to the home console space earlier. Seems reasonable enough, at first glance. But unfortunately, this explanation just doesn’t hold water to me either. I’d contend that all the talk of this so-called “arcade crash of 1994” is somewhat overblown, as the players involved have tried to make it out like the whole market just suddenly collapsed overnight and never recovered. But this simply isn’t true: There were plenty of warning signs along the way — clear indications made to publishers that they’d have to diversify or die as the new generation of home consoles began to take form. And there were still immensely popular cabinet titles releasing on something like a monthly basis through this period — games which could only be played in the arcade for a time, owing to their advanced technology or to agreements made with distributors. (In example; Daytona USA, Mortal Kombat III, and Virtua Fighter 2.) Of course, the real damning detail here is that while there genuinely was a decrease in market revenue for the arcade industry – starting with $8 billion in ‘93,^[33] moving down to $7 billion in ‘94,^[34] and plummeting to $4.8 billion in ‘95^[35] – it was really just a brief dip at the time: 1996 saw revenues jump all the way back up to $8 billion for the year.^[36] Yes, the home consoles would eventually kill the arcade market for real over the course of the following decade; but the way Grebe tries to make it sound like the arcades never recovered back in the mid-90s just reads like revisionist history to me — a weak excuse to cover for ALG’s own failures.

If Grebe wants to pretend like his company’s downward spiral was due to a singular circumstance that he had no control over, then we might as well play the role of reductionist on our part as well: So, y’all wanna hear the real reason American Laser Games failed to stay in business? It was a lack of ambition to innovate until they were already behind the curve, and a lack of resources allotted to improving their games. That’s what it all boils down to, really. First, they spent four years pumping out largely identical products into the arcades, with the most minimal / superficial of iterations between them. Consumers were able to tell from a glance how an ALG title was generally going to play (assuming they’d previously experienced something like Mad Dog McCree), and could quickly determine that their newer titles were doing little to improve on the older ones. This led to diminishing returns long before the market crashed, and created a negative connotation around their brand. Factor in more technically impressive / exciting lightgun titles starting to emerge at around the same time, and it becomes clear that ALG simply sat back and watched as the market passed them by. Their attempt to catch back up in the arcade space with Shootout at Old Tucson reads as “too little, too late,” and feels downright antiquated compared to its contemporaries. It was only when they saw that the arcade market was due for a recession that they saw an excuse to bail on it, and finally started to take the home console sector seriously… Only, they had already messed this opportunity up for themselves, too: After years spent commissioning other developers to convert their FMV games for them / to these platforms, they’d already established an equally toxic reputation (especially among reviewers) on this front as well! And by backing the wrong horse in the 3DO, they had effectively guaranteed that their new range of games would have no real reach. While it didn’t even matter if these new games were particularly good or not, it probably didn’t help them any when their debut effort in Mazer turned out to be largely lacklustre. By the time they had burned through the last of their dwindling resources on developing Shining Sword for PlayStation, it wouldn’t have mattered if that game had somehow turned out to be spectacular, either: The damage had already been done.

Look, I don’t actually want to end this article being so down on American Laser Games. The fact is that I still get a kick out of a lot of their titles, and that I wouldn’t have minded one bit if they had managed to stick around in the industry for a while longer — just so long as they actually treated their employees with the respect and dignity they deserved, rather than the route they ultimately went down. Putting aside the details of the drama that played out behind-the-scenes, there’s a legacy attached to ALG that I do feel warrants recognition and appreciation in the history of gaming: For a moment in time, they were genuine innovators in advancing the format of FMV games when no one else knew quite what to do with them, and their games helped to put the broader lightgun genre on the map. That might not mean much to Robert Grebe, whose only recognition of ALG’s accomplishments seems to amount to the following: “I probably justify a page or two in the annals of video game history. I don’t know if there’s really any legacy beyond that.”^[9h] But to those of us truly invested in the history and evolution of the medium, ALG should warrant more than just a footnote or off-hand reference in the proverbial history book: Their rise and fall is absolutely a subject worthy of study, as it perfectly demonstrates the dangers of complacency in a constantly-evolving industry. For as long as this article may already be, I assure you that there’s still so much more to the story here — so many interesting details I had to purposefully omit, and still so much more left unspoken by those who were there to see first-hand how it all went down. I hope we’ve at least managed to establish one thing for certain here, though: You can’t just blame Mazer on its own for ALG’s demise. Then again, it’s not as if any of this history is really gonna matter too much when the Semag-Resal finally decide to wipe our minds of the very memory of video games ever having existed. Oh well: It’s just about time for me anyway to get back to my job at the killer robot assembly line!

** These numbers come second-hand from a post to the NeoGAF forums by a user ‘Afro Republican,’ who evidently sourced them from 3DO’s own press releases issued through Business Wire [in August and October of 1996]. The only issue is, I can’t track down copies of these press releases for myself for verification, and the user in question got banned from NeoGAF thereby making them inaccessible for follow-up questions / document sharing requests. As it stands, we just have to take it on faith that these reported numbers are accurate. At the very least, we can confirm that The 3DO Company did issue their press releases through Business Wire (example seen here for December 1995), providing updates on what games had gone “Gold” (100K copies sold) or “Platinum” (250K copies sold) over time.

[1] ^{b c} O’Connor, Patricia. “Business with a HIS & HERS Twist.” Albuquerque Journal, 109th Year, No. 282. Journal Publishing Co. October 9, 1989. Print. (Partial scan available)
[2] ^{b c} Conaway, Janelle. “Local Firm Takes Aim at New Market.” Albuquerque Journal, 110th Year, No. 257. Journal Publishing Co. September 14, 1990. Print. (Partial scan available)
[3] Watson, Carol. “Worst-Case Videos.” Los Angeles Times. August 29, 1991. Web.
[4] “The Player’s Choice.” RePlay Magazine, Volume 16, Issue 5. RePlay Publishing. February, 1991. Print. (Scan available)†
[5] “ACME: The Industry at Work.” RePlay Magazine, Volume 16, Issue 8. RePlay Publishing. May, 1991. Print. (Scan available)†
[6] “Mad Dog’s Makin’ Bacon.” RePlay Magazine, Volume 16, Issue 6. RePlay Publishing. March, 1991. Print. (Scan available)†
[7] Patterson, Rebecca H. “The newest home video game: Kill or be killed.” Tampa Bay Times. August 20, 1992. Web.
[8] Farhi, Paul. “Zap! Pow! Splat!… Splat?” The Washington Post. August 25, 1991. Web.
[9] ^{b c d e f g h} Horvath, George J. “The Full Motion Vita of American Laser Games with Robert Grebe.” Land of Obscusion. September 12, 2015. Web.
[10] “Testscreen: Mad Dog McCree.” Edge Online. February 1994. (Archived)
[11] Weigand, Mike. “Review Crew: Major Mike’s Game Roundup.” Electronic Gaming Monthly, Issue 61. Sendai Publishing. August, 1994. Print. (Scan available)
[12] Neves, Lawrence. “ProReview: Crime Patrol.” GamePro, Volume 7, Issue 4. IDG Communications. April, 1995. Print. (Scan available)
[13] “Equipment Poll: Video & Pinball Combined.” Play Meter, Volume 20, Issue 12. Skybird Publishing. November, 1994. Print. (Scan available)
[14] ^b “QQP Shut Down.” Computer Game Review. December, 1995. Web. (Archive)
[15] ‘Doc English.’ “Coin Machine: American Laser Games Files Suit Against Picmatic.” Cash Box, Volume 56, Issue 32. Cash Box Publishing. April 17, 1993. Print. (Scan available)
[16] ^b D’Aprile, Jason. “Mazer.” 3 For The 3DO Enthusiast, Issue 6. PiM Publications. October, 1995. Print. (Scan available)
[17] “Finals: Mazer.” NEXT Generation, Volume 1, Issue 12. Imagine Publishing. December, 1995. Print. (Scan available)
[18] Wynne, Stuart Spencer. “Review: Mazer.” 3DO Magazine (UK), Issue 6. Paragon Publishing. October, 1995. Print. (Scan available)
[19] ‘The Outlaw.’ “ProReview: Mazer.” GamePro, Volume 7, Issue 12. IDG Communications. December, 1995. Print. (Scan available)
[20] Lucas, Victor. “Reviews: Mazer.” Electric Playground. August 13, 1995. (Archived)
[21] “News.” 3DO Magazine (UK), Issue 8. Paragon Publishing. February, 1996. Print. (Scan available)
[22] “Press Start: Goldstar Drops 3DO.” Electronic Gaming Monthly, Issue 80. Sendai Publishing. March 1996. Print. (Scan available)
[23] “ProNews: 3DO’s Downhill Slide Begins.” GamePro, Volume 8, Issue 7. IDG Communications. July, 1996. Print. (Scan available)
[24] ^b “ProNews: More Layoffs for Video Game Companies.” GamePro, Volume 9, Issue 1. IDG Communications. January, 1997. Print. (Scan available)
[25] “Challenge for Computer Industry: To Attract Girls as Well as Boys.” Chicago Tribune. January 3, 1996. Web.
[26] Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. Chapter titled “Alternatives: Games for Girls and Women” written by Sheri Graner Ray. Published by CMP Books. 2004. Print. (Partial scan available)
[27] Ray, Sheri Graner. “Looking Back on 20 years — American Laser Games / Her Interactive.” SheriGranerRay.com. May 14, 2010. Web.
[28] Ray, Sheri Graner. “More from the 20 year saga.” SheriGranerRay.com. May 14, 2010. Web.
[29] Ray, Sheri Graner. “From American Laser Games to Her Interactive.” SheriGranerRay.com. July 22, 2010. Web.
[30] Ray, Sheri Graner. “From American Laser Games to Sirenia Software.” SheriGranerRay.com. July 22, 2010. Web.
[31] “The Top 100 PC Games of the 21st Century.” Edge. August 25, 2006. Web. (Archived)
[32] Cook, John. “Maker of ‘Nancy Drew’ games cuts staff, cites changes in game industry.” GeekWire. May 1, 2015. Web.
[33] McKanic, Patricia Ann. “Video Values.” The Ledger [Lakeland, Florida], Volume 88, Issue 153. The New York Times Company. March 24, 1994. Print. (Scan available)
[34] Armstrong, Larry. “Raiders Of The Video Arcade.” Bloomberg. October 17, 1994. Web. (Paywalled)
[35] “3Dfx Interactive Announces Low-Cost System for Coin-Op/Arcade Video Game Industry.” PR Newswire. March 7, 1996. Web. (Archived via The Free Library)
[36] Kaplan, David A. and Corie Brown. “Spielberg’s Arcade of the Future.” The Moscow Times. March 12, 1997. Web. (Archived)

† RePlay Magazine has a tendency toward copyright-striking down archives of their back catalogue. At the moment, the best bet for those looking to reference these materials comes in the form of torrents provided by Gaming Alexandria, where the magazine’s collected printings for the year 1991 are currently preserved.