Gotcha! The Sport! is a 1987 light gun game developed by Atlus and published by LJN. It is based on a 1985 movie and used as a vehicle to promote LJN’s paintball guns. When I started to look into this game, I stumbled across a whole bunch of other games with the name “Gotcha.”
There are three things to talk about here. I’ll briefly touch on the movie and the toy line, but most of what I’ll be doing is talking about the game. This is one of the many games that I didn’t know about until I started collecting retro games, and didn’t play it until the late 2010s.
There are some unique features in this game, but it isn’t all that special. The NES didn’t have a lot of light gun games, so having something like this is nice. As far as LJN games go, this is one of the better ones. That doesn’t mean it is great; it simply means it is better than the other slop that LJN published.
TLDR: An average Light Gun Game that really needed more levels.
Licensed Properties
So, we have a movie and a toy line to talk about. I had no idea that the movie existed, or how many kids would’ve known that back in 1987. The toy line would’ve been more front and center in kids’ minds than a spy movie that was two years old.
The name of the game and the toy line make more sense when you realize there is a movie behind it. Paintball is the only thing that LJN took from the movie. The rest of the plot is an action comedy based on a college student and a Czechoslovakian spy. This was the 1980s, and the countries weren’t split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
LJN was making a line of paintball and water guns that looked like real guns. They weren’t the only company that was doing this at the time. After a string of police shootings, changes were made to these guns to make them look less realistic. It hurt LJN, and they were sold to Acclaim by their parent company. Once the sale was complete, LJN exited the toy business and focused on being a video game publisher.
The paintball guns were a separate toy line from Entertech. There isn’t too much information on the paintball guns out there. You can find commercials for the toys, but it looks like they faded away along with the rest of LJN’s toy business.
I remember toy guns that looked real, and the attempts to get around that by painting the gun barrel orange. By the time I was old enough to notice, toy guns with an orange tip on the barrel were the norm. I had no idea the movie existed, and after watching it,
Narrative
This is supposed to be a game of capture the flag. There isn’t really a narrative, though. It’s not all that different from the other light gun games from the 1980s, especially those on the NES.
Gameplay
This is a light gun game, which makes it a little difficult to play nowadays because of the technical limitations. You need to have the light gun and the controller. It is a unique control scheme, which might’ve been fun back in the 1980s.
I do want to say that you could use a controller with Duck Hunt in conjunction with the zapper. The difference is that you don’t need the controller. Gotcha has you shoot with one hand and scroll the screen with the controller. I applaud LJN for trying this.
There are three levels, which loop endlessly. Each time the game loops, it speeds up a bit. This type of gameplay loop isn’t too different from other light gun games, so I can’t knock the game too much.
Your goal is to capture the enemy flag and return it to your flagpole. You’ll have to defend your flag as well. There is a map at the top of the screen which shows the location of each flag.
The game has three difficulty settings. This is a nice way of doing things, but it only controls the speed at which you start. Given how the game only has three levels, it doesn’t change too much.
There isn’t too much else to talk about with this. The gameplay is simple and matches what other games were like at this time. Even though this is a short game, I could see someone enjoying it for a little while before going outside.
Visuals
The graphics are okay. Enemies stand out, as well as the flags. The levels aren’t all that creative, but they each are different enough. There are only three of them, which is a little disappointing.
The levels and the enemies are different from each other. I think they look good for what they are, but they are fairly short. Here are the levels:
- Forest – You fight generic guys in multi colored camouflage
- Urban – This looks like a street from an 80s movie like Deathwish. You fight generic “punks” with mohawks.
- Winter – With this level, the flags really stand out. You’re again fighting generic guys in camouflage, but they have hats! Because it is cold.
The levels scroll from side to side quite smoothly. It is easy to see the enemies and the flags. There is also a lot of detail in these three levels.
The graphics look decent enough for a 1987 NES game. Enemy sprites are well detailed, and the levels look good. I just wish there were more than three levels, because things get very repetitive.
7/10. The game functions, and it can be fun to play. For an LJN game, that is the bare minimum you should expect. This is definitely not the worst LJN game; it just isn’t all that great.
Conclusion
This is a perfectly fine NES game. It isn’t very deep, but it gets the job done. Atlus took one part of the movie and turned it into something that can be fun for a while.
This is a weird one because it is a movie based game, and one that is trying to sell toys. Both the movie and the paintball guns feel like they’re pretty obscure. I didn’t remember the toys, but I know that other people do. After watching the movie, I don’t really understand why LJN wanted the license. It feels very weird.
This is one of the more playable LJN games, or at least it was. I’m not too sure if people have finally figured out how to get an NES zapper to work with modern TVs or not. I know people were trying, but I haven’t heard anything about it for a while.
If you liked this post, please check out my other posts on LJN games. Such as Jaws or Back to the Future.