How to play Spy Hunter online
The original game came with a plastic Dual Control Module that held two joysticks side by side. You steered with the first joystick and used both fire buttons.
- Steer: left and right arrow keys
- Speed up / slow down: up and down arrow keys
- Fire weapons: Space bar and A (the two fire buttons: forward weapons and rear weapons)
- Choose the game: F4 sets the Player 1 difficulty switch: A for Game 1 (harder), B for Game 2 (easier)
- Start: F12 (Reset), then press fire
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it
Gameplay
Each run begins with the weapons van driving up the road and letting your spy car roll out of the back, armed with machine guns, while the Spy Hunter theme plays. Leave the road and you lose a car; lose them all and the game is over. The background colour changes whenever you enter a new kind of terrain, and each time the weapons van appears again to hand you a new weapon. Further on, the car drives into a boathouse and comes out as a spy boat.
One fire button controls the forward weapons, the machine gun and missiles. The other controls the rear weapons, the smoke screen and oil slick. You can also ram some enemies off the road. The enemy agents include:
- Road Lord: bulletproof, so the only way to stop it is to ram it off the road
- Switch Blade: slashes your tyres with buzz-saw hubcaps
- Enforcer: fires a shotgun
- The Copter (Mad Bomber): drops bombs on you from above
- Barrel Dumper: drops oil barrels in the water ahead of your boat
- Doctor Torpedo: fires torpedoes at your boat
On land the enemy agents are blue. On the water, everything is an enemy.
Game 1 and Game 2
Game 2 gives you 90 seconds to finish the first leg of the course, with unlimited cars during that time. Extra cars you earn meanwhile, one at 7,000 points, another at 10,000 and one for every 20,000 after that, are saved for after the timer runs out. Game 1 also begins with a 90-second opening run, but the whole game is harder.
Tips
- Be bold in Game 2’s first 90 seconds. Cars are unlimited then, so use the time to learn the road and build up points.
- Don’t waste bullets on the Road Lord. It is bulletproof. Pull alongside and push it off the road.
- Use the rear weapons on chasers. Smoke and oil deal with enemies behind you.
- Watch the colour change. A new background colour means new terrain, and the weapons van is about to show up with a new weapon.
- Pause trick: the manual says you can pause by stopping your car when two trees are on the screen at the same time.
History
Bally Midway released Spy Hunter in arcades in 1983. It was one of the top-earning arcade games in America in 1984 and 1985, and it is remembered for its electronic version of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” theme. Sega published the Atari 2600 version in 1984, produced in-house, with Jeff Lorenz as programmer. Today the 2600 cartridge is fairly rare.
Similar games to play next
- Bump ‘n’ Jump – another top-down road game where you knock enemy cars off the road
- James Bond 007 – Parker Brothers’ spy adventure with a car that also works on water
- River Raid – a vertically scrolling shooter along a river
- Tac-Scan – another of Sega’s arcade conversions for the 2600