Publisher: Williams

The Narc Game is a run and gun game from Williams Electronics, it hit the arcades back in 1988. NARC has gorgeous digitized graphics, especially in the late 80’s, as we didn’t see games like Mortal Kombat til the early 90’s.

It was one of the very first ultra-violent games of it’s generation, and sparked an array of criticism from parents, aimed at the video game industry.

PLAYING NARC

Your goal in NARC is to arrest and kill drug offenders, take their money and drugs and beat “Mr. Big”, who is a wealthy businessman and head of Mr. Big International.

He is also the leader of K.R.A.K, the criminal cartel who are involved in the production and smuggling of illegal drugs.

THE NARC OFFICERS

You control either Max Force or Hit Man, each player is equipped with an automatic weapon and a missile launcher.

When an enemy is destroyed with the missile launcher, it can get pretty gruesome too! If you want to play good cop rather than bad cop, you can usually crouch and approach your enemies and arrest them, this leads to a “Busted” sign above the enemies head.

After arresting them, they then float away to some strange prison in the sky (I presume). On the plus side, for being a good cop, you do get awarded additional points at the end of the round.

THE PORTS

NARC game came out in 1990 for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), published by Acclaim and developed by Rare, this was one of the first games with a strong anti-drug message.

I think that was the only way they thought the game was ever going to get a license from Nintendo! Meanwhile, Nintendo forced them to remove all drug references from the game, yet the game retained all of its violence, interesting.

Meanwhile, David Wise ported the music for the NES version, later on the music would also be used for the GameBoy version of Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

The other versions were published by Ocean, and the game was a critically acclaimed success with favourable reviews from many magazines of the day.

However, none of the NARC ports even tried to tackle the digitized graphics, the Commodore Amiga version could have taken advantage of this but didn’t.

In 2005, NARC had a new game released for PS2, Xbox and Windows.

PLAY NARC IN YOUR BROWSER

You can play NARCS in your browser, thanks to archive.org, please note, the game was before ratings were introduced, and due to the violence and drug references, should only be played by adults!

Controls:

To Load: Wait for diagnostics to run, then Press F2 , go to “Exit to Game Over” then Press space bar to start

Insert Coin: Press 5 Start Game: Press 1

Up, Down, Left, Right: Use arrow keys on keyboard

Fire: Left CTRL Jump: Left ALT Crouch: Left Shift Rocket Bomb: Space

Game platforms: Arcade, Amstrad CPC, Commodore Amiga, Commodore 64, NES, ZX Spectrum

NARC GAME ARCADE CABINET

VIEW NARC GAME BOX ART

TITLE SCREENS FOR NARC GAME

GAMEPLAY SCREENS FOR NARC

ARCADE VIDEO OF NARC GAME

Love retro games? Check out the Top 75 Retro Gaming Blogs in 2020 for Retro Gamers, over at Feedspot. And yes, I am in it

NARC DOCUMENTARY BY PATMAN QC

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