THIS ARTICLE NEEDS TO BE REWRITTEN. BELIEVE NOTHING IT SAYS.

The only American coverage of Bounty Arms known to the author lies in the April 1995 issue of Diehard Gamefan, a publication reputed for its extensive features on import titles. At the bottom of page 89, in a section entitled “Nick Rox’s PlayStation Previews,” one finds screenshots and a brief description of Bounty Arms.

The caption, presumably penned by Nick “Rox” Des Barres, curtly paints Bounty Arms as a 2-D overheard shooter in the mold of Mercs, Ikari Warriors, and Commando. It credits the game to Data West (not East), a little-known label responsible for the three Rayxanber shooters, the Psychic Detective titles, and the PlayStation action/RPG Brave Prove. Data West had no clout in America, so it’s unlikely that this small preview was based on an actual demo received by Gamefan. Judging by the somewhat unclear screenshots and two-sentence introduction, Nick was working with scans from a Japanese magazine.

Bounty Arms wasn’t brought up in Gamefan again until the end of 1995, when a reader mentioned the game in a letter. The “Postmeister” replied that Bounty Arms had missed its scheduled April release date, and that it had been “canceled, I suppose.” So ended the publicity for Bounty Arms on American shores. Contrary to the Postmeister’s conjecture, Bounty Arms was still on Japanese release schedules, where it remained, without a street date, as late as summer 1996.

With such limited evidence that Bounty Arms ever existed, I can only speculate about the game. And speculate I shall.

Remember how, in 1995, all the girls started wearing tank tops and one shoulder pad?

The first image shows what is most likely a character selection screen and an introduction to the heroines of Bounty Arms. Though their names have a needlessly ornate font, it would seem that the blonde on the left is Chris, and the redhead is Rei. Their anime-vixen look recalls Madison and Crystal of the Genesis blast-‘em-up Trouble Shooter (or Kei and Yuri of the Dirty Pair, to go straight to the source), but they're unique main characters in a genre that normally prefers bland tough-guy protagonists. If you’re going to build a better Guerrilla War, you can at least start with the dichotomy of underdressed female leads, at once empowered and pandering.

It’s not clear if Bounty Arms has a semblance of plot or anything else that might give its heroines personalities, but Chris’ lack of a bare midriff could suggest her as the more reserved of the two. One can almost image cut-scenes of her spouting cautious, fretful observations, while Rei flirts with level bosses. Then again, Rei looks somewhat irritable, so maybe she’s more of a headstrong, mercurial soldier; Kei to Chris’ Yuri, in Dirty Pair parlance. Or perhaps I’m putting too much thought into this. Let’s move on.

Sadly, critics didn't much care for Data West's rainforest-clearing simulator.

The second screen intrigues me the most. Here we find Rei and Chris storming through a jungle while fighting robots and creating impressive rings of fire around them. Though the effect is striking, it’s not clear if they’re using a specific weapon or simply blowing up surrounding enemies. As a fan of video game flamethrowers since Contra III, I prefer the former theory.

We find the first implication of the game’s setting in the robot to Rei’s left. Numerous run-and-gun titles favored modern tones with jungle scenery (to the extent that one retrospective nicknames the genre “South American Commando Slaughters”), yet Bounty Arms throws a high-tech theme into the mix, putting itself closer to Toaplan’s Out Zone than the likes of Commando.

Water Safety Rule: When getting out of a pond, avoid spewing electricity.

The third shot depicts some type of boss, a huge robotic serpent bursting from a waterfall and spiting electric bolts at Rei and Chris. The use of large, jointed sprites in the beast recalls the aesthetics of Contra Hard Corps for the Genesis, and the waterfall, if in motion, would have impressed. Like Sony’s own Gunners Heaven, Bounty Arms is unconcerned with the polygons and 3-D designs popular among early PlayStation titles. Instead, Data West was presumably intent on using the console’s capabilities to create a hand-drawn, two-dimensional overhead shooter with animation and detail beyond the range of 16-bit systems. Also of note are the transparent rectangular shapes at the bottom of the screen. Are they life meters? Weapon gauges? Or does Bounty Arms employ some "Limit Break" bar that fills as enemies are destroyed, eventually granting Rei or Chris short-term invincibility or an extremely nasty weapon?

Chris and Rei take on the evils of industrial architecture.

I'm not sure what’s going on in the fourth screen, although that’s probably Rei in the lower right-hand corner. There’s a conspicuous lack of enemies around her, but an unmistakable bomb icon (note the “B”) sits in the bottom-left quadrant, along with some red, bloblike shape that could be an enemy, a power-up, or even a friendly alien sidekick that bounces around, turning fallen foes into fruit and bonus points. The odds aren’t good for that last case, though I’ve seen far stranger mixes of cute and violent in Japanese action games.

The large metal structure that dominates the view is also something of a mystery. Too dull to be a boss, it may be a part of the level that’s floating in the player’s field of vision, a generator or furnace that must be destroyed, or possibly another obstacle in the player’s path. Somehow, this bland steel scenery makes me want to play Bounty Arms all the more. Curiosity is a wonderful and frequently stupid thing, no?

The variety of locales in these images may imply that Bounty Arms reached a relatively advanced stage of development. Taking the lead time of the typical publication into account, the shots in Gamefan were perhaps published by the Japanese press in January or February of 1995. As Bounty Arms stayed on release lists for over a year, it's likely that Data West programmed a good deal of the game before dropping it.

Of course, there remains the question of why Data West canceled Bounty Arms at all. In 1995, it had little direct competition, as there were no other games of its kind on the PlayStation and few anywhere else. Yet it may be that the company was intimidated by high-profile wonders such as Ridge Racer, Toshinden, and Jumping Flash, and maybe even low-profile titles such as The Raiden Project, Arc the Lad, and Gunners Heaven. With Sony’s introduction of the PlayStation, the Saturn’s debut, the anticipation surrounding the Nintendo 64, and the surprising viability of the last great 16-bit games, 1995 was a very busy year, and it’s possible that a company would shelve a project solely because of the flood of software on the Japanese market. Indeed, it’s a wonder anyone at the time even bothered to notice that Bounty Arms was missing from release schedules.

It’s impossible to say if Bounty Arms is a decent game or not, but many shooter fans regard the Rayxanber series highly, and one might assume that Data West would be every bit as accomplished in making overheard action titles as they were in creating side-scrolling shoot-‘em-ups. Bounty Arms was certainly capable of looking good; despite claims to the contrary, the PlayStation is capable of supporting highly-quality 2-D animation, and Bounty Arms seemed, as Nick Rox put, “effects-laden.” Besides, many old-fashioned venues of gaming were marginalized in the mid-1990s, and at the time, it would have been quite refreshing to find a traditional Mercs-inspired game that took advantage of the newest hardware.

Furthermore, Bounty Arms would be relevant even today. Ikari Warriors, Out Zone, and Caliber 50 were arcade staples some fifteen years ago, but they have few modern descendents outside of SNK’s Shock Troopers titles. Theirs is a genre that faded without receiving either a proper name (“run-and-gun” seems as close as anyone ever came) or something that perfected the form. Bounty Arms may not have been that special something, but it shows every sign of being an attractive credit to its inspirations.

Whatever it is, Bounty Arms is seldom mentioned. Its only appearances on the Internet are in detail-free listings of early PlayStation games, and Data West, which has long since ceased to create games that matter, presents no record of Bounty Arms on its site. Prototypes might exist in Japan, of course. Unfinished demos of Bounty Arms may lie in a company’s storage rooms or the stockpiles of collectors. Yet ferreting out betas would prove difficult, especially for occidental folk.

It’s a mere footnote in early PlayStation history, and yet in only four screenshots, Bounty Arms makes me regret its loss. And so I’ll keep looking and welcome even the most trivial detail about the game or the company that created it. Bounty Arms may be lost, but I hope its story isn’t.