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Contra (魂斗羅, Kontora?), released as Gryzor in Europe and Oceania, is an arcade game released in 1987 by the Konami corporation. The player controls a commando who battles waves of enemies including humans, machines, mutants and aliens to reach his ultimate goal. Much of the game's popularity came from its two-player simultaneous gameplay, which was an uncommon feature in video games at the time of Contra's release. While successful in the arcades, the game became and remained widely popular and remembered when it was ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1988. Contra was voted #1 by gaming website IGN.com as being the "Toughest Game to Beat".[1]

Plot

The player takes control of an armed commando named Bill Rizer, or his partner Lance Bean, as they are sent to infiltrate the island headquarters of an alien army calling themselves Red Falcon and thwart their plot to invade the Earth. The backstory differs slightly between sources. The original Japanese promotional flyer for the arcade version places the game's setting specifically on the month of December 2633 A.D. and cites the movies Rambo, Commando and Alien in its blurb.[2] The Famicom version released in Japan features an intro which fleshes out this plot. The aliens are revealed to have arrived in a meteor that fell into the fictional Galuga (or Galga) archipelago near New Zealand two years prior to the event of the game.[3]

When the NES version of the game was released in North America, the opening intro was removed and the game's manual changes numerous details. The game's setting is moved from a fictional Oceanian island in the distant future to an unspecified region of Central America near the ruins of a Mayan civilization in the present day. The main characters retain their given names, but are now referred by the codenames of "Mad Dog" and "Scorpion". The name "Red Falcon" also became the name of the alien entity Bill and Lance fought, rather than the name of the terrorist organization itself. The meteor is stated to have arrived fifty years earlier as well.[4] This discrepancy with the game's setting between Japanese and American sources would cause the subsequent Contra games to follow a different continuity in each region. It wasn't until the English localization of Contra: Shattered Soldier that the series would follow the original Japanese continuity in North America.

When Contra was covered in the debut issue of Nintendo Power magazine, the original Japanese plot was used for the article. Probotector, the PAL version of the NES game, also follows the Japanese plot in its manual, but replaces all references of Bill and Lance with the Probotector robots RD008 and RC011 (see below for more info).[5]

This was brought life to side scrolling action video games. Who can forget the infamous code. "Up up down down left right left right B A"