Sky Kid

About Sky Kid

Sky Kid (1985) is Namco's two-player biplane shooter in which the Sky Kids Red Baron and Blue Max must pick up a bomb en route to blowing up fortresses and ships, looping their planes past hidden Namco characters.

Sky Kid in Depth

The players are the Sky Kids, "Red Baron" and "Blue Max", named after the World War I ace Manfred von Richthofen and the Pour le Mérite medal informally known as the Blue Max. Flying biplanes, they are assigned specific targets to bomb on each mission, using one button for the machine gun and the other to perform a loop. Their planes start without a bomb, which must be picked up on the way to the target, while ground and air units try to stop them and some missions demand flying through inhospitable terrain or around cities. Targets are fortress complexes or ships, and later in the 21 missions several targets appear in one mission. Points come from destroying air and ground targets, with an end-of-mission bonus for each, points for how much of the target is destroyed, and a further bonus only for its total destruction.

Looping over a billboard sometimes reveals one of four hidden Namco characters: Pac-Man, Inky, Rally-X's Special Flag or Dig Dug's Pooka. At the end of each mission, three dancing girls appear; looping in front of them makes them send hearts representing kisses, while shooting them turns the girls into pink powder puffs and the hearts into waving dogs.

Making Sky Kid

Namco developed and published Sky Kid in Japan in December 1985, and Game Machine listed it as Japan's second most successful table arcade unit in its 15 January 1986 issue. An NES port came out in Japan on 22 August 1986 and in North America in September 1987, and at least one version was imported into the UK. The NES version later came to the Virtual Console on the Wii, 3DS and Wii U, the arcade version to the Wii Virtual Console, and Hamster released it in Arcade Archives in October 2021. A sequel, Sky Kid Deluxe, followed in 1986 as the first game on Namco's System 86 hardware, adding new enemies and targets, including the unkillable "Kaminari Kid"; its first worldwide console release came in Namco Museum Virtual Arcade for the Xbox 360, without Blue Max. Sky Kid was briefly revived as a ShiftyLook webcomic illustrated by Udon Entertainment, and a Sky Kid theme was released as DLC for Pac-Man 99.