This is the latest in Powet Editor Zac Shipley’s series on video game culture in Madison, WI for TheDailyPage.

Joe Rheaume’s Excellent Adventure: Chronotron goes from Madison to Penny Arcade Expo
The online comic strip and blog Penny Arcade has been a leading tastemaker in the gaming world for nearly a decade now. It has reached new heights over the last five years with its own convention, the Penny Arcade Expo, held every August in Seattle. Though gamers from all over the nation will find a weekend of fun and competition at this year’s con, Madison native Joe Rheaume will be an invited guest to show his hit time travel game Chronotron. >More

Play Chronotron now.

During the 80s, Cold War hysteria was at its peak, even as the Cold War itself was slowly ending. Mikhail Gorbachev was appointed new leader of a collapsing Soviet Union, movies such as Red Dawn and Amerika scared viewers with nightmares of a fictional Soviet takeover of the United States, and sports films such as Rocky IV displayed their own subliminal stances on the situation by depicting American athletes defeating Russian and Chinese competitors. Of course video games followed suit as well. One of the most influential was Konami’s Rush’n Attack (Russian Attack – get it?). Rush’n Attack was the name given to the North American version of the 1985 arcade game Green Beret. Players took control of a nameless marine as he used his knife to defeat the enemy forces and rescue his captured comrades. The enemy soldiers came at you from all sides, and you had to fend them off or avoid them, as just one hit would kill you. This made it kind of funny, because if you actually did “rush and attack” like the title says, then you’d be defeated within seconds. You gained weapons such as pistols and flame throwers, but they had limited ammo, and before long you were back to using your knife. It wasn’t a bad game, but It was nothing mind blowing either. If anything, it could be considered a spiritual predecessor to Konami’s Contra, which came a few years later.

However, when Rush’n Attack was ported to the Nintendo Entertainment System, it became something special. The plot was changed, and instead of rescuing POWs, your character had to destroy the enemy’s secret weapon. There were new weapons, 2-player co-op play, and the arcade’s military-style drumbeat that played throughout the levels was replaced by a full melodic soundtrack. It was a rare instance of a NES port of an arcade game being superior to the arcade original. While it wasn’t the classic that Contra was, Konami’s side-scrolling made its own unique impact on 8-bit gaming. Yeah, the arcade version is available on Xbox Live Arcade, but it just isn’t the same. Hopefully we should see the NES version on the Wii Virtual Console in the near future, provided it isn’t there already.