Nintendo Sheriff 1979 by Shigeru Miyamoto
This game is the first to have a story driven plot where you take on the role of jack on his daily patrol of being sheriff.
His Fiancée is kidnapped by these gangs of villains which circle around jack trying to shot him.
Your aim is to kill the gangs and rescue Betty.
This is the first original game by Nintendo and has a unique control system with a 8 way joystick to control his movement and a pivoting switch or gas knob as I like to call it which controls his arm and if you push in will fire.
If you manage to shoot all the gangs on 3 levels you are greeted with a love scene where Betty and jack kiss and a big love heart appears on the screen and your score will double.
If you finish level 8 your score will multiply again X2
There are 9 levels in all & once completed its back to level one and it gets a little faster.
What attracted me to collecting this game was first I remember playing this as a kid in the arcade along with boot hill which also is a fantastic game but also the fact you cant play this in mame due to its unique control system which meant you could only really play this if you had the dedicated machine. And being a Nintendo collector and having collected game & watch for years This was a must have game for me.
Its the first game that the master of game design Shigeru Miyamoto worked on and the creator of all the game and watch characters also did the art work on the cabinet him self.
So for a fan of Shigeru Miyamoto and the game & watch series this really is grail cab for me.
I’ve been looking for this game for many years now and this year something unbelievable happened, Three turned up in the space of 6 months and i've managed to obtain two of the rarest Nintendo machines in the world.
First up a guy contacted me on my facebook page (Ninty Arcade) and he said he has a sheriff & its been in his family for 25 years,where his dad had it in an ice rink but unfortunately it doesn’t work now and even worse he didn’t want to sell to me.
Its in the regular white top cocktail cabinet in which I already have 3 of, Space fever, space launcher and space Firebird and I had lots of spares. So I said let me come over and change the power supply and have ago at getting it going. Also I just wanted to see this game again so it was very exciting.
I Saw, i fixed and I played this rare game it was fantastic, at last I got to play it again.
Then it wasn’t until early summer this year I got offered to buy the upright version from my good friend Bruno who runs the dragons lair forum (DLF).
I took a road trip to Luxembourg to where he lives 900miles there and back in two days to get my grail cab.
The upright is like space invaders where the image is projected onto a half mirror, When I was a kid I thought it was a magic box as I could never understand how they made the game look so deep inside.
As you can see the art work is the best i've seen on any Nintendo machine as it wraps round all 3 sides and gives the look of an old western saloon bar.
The characters at the bottom are the gangs chasing Betty and they were designed by the artist who created all the game and watch characters.
If you look closely at Betty on the bezel she has no mouth, strange ?
In a line up of Nintendo machines this looks the best.
Then at the beginning of this week a good friend muddymusic contacted me about a sheriff that had appeared on ebay under the title (Rare retro sega arcade machine),
As soon as I looked at it I knew straight away what it was and I brought it with no hesitation.
This cab came up 5 years ago on ebay & I remember seeing it but never realised how rare it really was until I started my own Nintendo arcade collection.
Ever since then ive been looking out for it.
Its actually rarer than my upright and its a Japanese version.
Until now all we had to go on was a picture on a flyer which is not very accurate because the picture of the sheriff upright is wrong as there is no speaker grill.
So when you compare the picture with the machine certain things don’t add up.
Like the colour and the control panel and because they listed it as sega made me think this wasn’t a Nintendo machine.
But ive done my research and with the help from Erik Voskuil and Florent Gorges who have written books about the history of Nintendo & Before Mario all concur that in the early days before Nintendo really had there own arcade games they got Sega to distribute some of there early games.
So I travelled 5 hours to Lancashire from Twickenham London to pick up this cab I could not wait to see what it was, Sega or Nintendo.
I was blown away by how cool this machine looked, the control panel looks mint and the cabinet is in amazing condition for its age. Even though its got a built in ash try with some cigarettes left in it I don’t think this has ever been in arcade its beautiful.
So inside its got an original Nintendo logic board and sound board just like my upright version but it looks like it been modified for this particular monitor which has NS and sega enterprise written on it.
On all my other cocktails Nintendo use sanyo so maybe if you have an early sega game you might be able to recognise it.
So there it is The cocktail as the Japanese like to call it or the cabertail as ive heard it been called also.
Nintendo didn’t make them they used Sega's already in production cabinets they used on games like Head on and Carnival and they let Nintendo put there own control panels on them and games inside and sega distributed them but only in this particular cabinet,.
Sega & Nintendo went onto to be the biggest rivals in video game history.
But they left a legacy of something they do well when they work together.
A well designed cabinet to place drinks on and cigarettes in, And a Cabinet you can play 2 player whilst standing up with out bending your back.
And a game that was the start for a young video game designer who went on to be the best in the world.
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