Super Contra

About Super Contra

Super Contra (1988) is Konami's arcade sequel to Contra, adding overhead stages and upgradable weapons as Bill and Lance fight an alien-possessed military base, ported to the NES as Super C and Probotector II.

Super Contra in Depth

A year after defeating the Red Falcon Organization, Bill Rizer and Lance Bean are sent back into action when alien forces take over an allied military base and possess most of its troops, forcing them to fight their former comrades as well as new, mutated forms of the aliens. Up to two players play at once, Bill in green and Lance in purple. The pseudo-3D and fixed-screen segments of the first game are gone, replaced by vertically scrolling overhead stages with eight-way movement, while side-scrolling stages now let players control jump height by holding the joystick up or down.

Flying capsules release a machine gun, spread gun, bomb gun or laser gun, now shown as the actual guns rather than Falcon letters, and picking up the same weapon twice upgrades it. In overhead stages, "hyper shell" items destroy everything on screen, can be stockpiled and carry over between those stages. Five stages cover a military base inside and out, a jungle and the alien lair, with stages 1, 3 and 4 side-on and 2 and 5 overhead. Depending on settings, up to four or six credits are allowed, and each player can now continue at any time. The English version ends after the final stage, while the Japanese version loops at maximum difficulty without continues.

Making Super Contra

Konami location-tested Super Contra in December 1987 and released it widely in January 1988; unlike the first game's Gryzor, it kept its title in Europe. Game Machine listed it as Japan's fourth most successful table arcade unit in its 1 March 1988 issue, and in 1997 EGM named it the ninth best arcade game of all time. The NES port came out in Japan on 2 February 1990 and in North America that April, with three new vertically scrolling stages, new bosses and a chargeable fireball gun, and Hidenori Maezawa rearranged the soundtrack; it sold more than 500,000 copies, and Allgame called it "an excellent game that a lot of hardcore gamers will never forget", while Famitsu gave the Famicom version 25 out of 40. The PAL Probotector II, released in 1992, replaced the heroes with robots. Distinctive Software made Amiga and PC versions based on the arcade game, and the arcade original was re-released on Xbox Live Arcade in 2007, in the Contra Anniversary Collection in 2019 and in Arcade Archives in 2024.