Bionic Commando (NES)
First, you take a single shot, maybe the most important shot anyone’s ever fired. And if your aim is true, that shot pierces a helicopter cockpit and explodes the head of none other than Adolf Hitler himself, resurrected as part of a nefarious plot by a new military regime. The gore depicting that cranial explosion is fleeting but, for the NES at least, quite shocking. Capcom really wanted you to savor the splatter your bullet had wrought. And if this had been all that set Bionic Commando’s ending apart, it would have been enough. Gamers who had grown up with Hitler’s Resurrection: Top Secret, as it was known in Japan, would still be sharing fond memories of it to this day. “Yo dude, remember how you made Hitler’s head explode?! That was sick!”
But the ending has another quality that’s just as remarkable: its surprising poignance. The game’s intro frames the whole thing as a flashback, starting with the awkward but memorable line, “I’ll talk about the person I met when I was young…” So it’s a story being told in the future, about a time that, for the teller, is now long past. The game’s final image is of a photo, dated “1989.4.7”—April 7 or perhaps July 4—a memory that, for the game’s narrator, is now just that, a long ago story of someone he met when he was young. For modern games, such framing devices wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy, but in 1988, for an NES game, it was remarkable, lending the innovative and exciting side-scrolling action-adventure game a nostalgic narrative pull that has now lingered in my memory for some 35 years.—Carolyn Petit
