Wild Guns

Wild Guns is a gallery shooter developed and published by Natsume for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, released in Japan in August 1994 and in North America in July 1995. It is one of the finest examples of its genre on any 16-bit platform, and a game that has only grown in reputation since its original release — copies now change hands for significant sums on the collector's market.

The game was developed by a small core team of three: Shunichi Taniguchi for design and graphics, Toshiyasu Miyabe for programming, and Hiroyuki Iwatsuki for sound. The team had previously worked together on The Ninja Warriors (1994) and were assigned to create something quickly while waiting for their next major project. Development lasted approximately five months. The result was anything but a rushed product.

The setting blends the Wild West with science fiction, inspired by the space western manga Cobra: a world of saloons, canyons, and bounty hunters, where outlaws arrive in mechs and the final boss is a giant robot. Annie, a young woman whose family has been murdered by the Kid Gang, enlists bounty hunter Clint to help her get revenge. One or two players choose between the two characters and set out across six stages of escalating intensity.

The gameplay places the player at the bottom of the screen, able to move left and right while a targeting reticle moves independently. Holding the fire button fixes the character in place and allows precision aiming; releasing it allows movement and dodging. Players can jump, double-jump, roll to avoid bullets, use a lasso to immobilise tough enemies, and swing a bat at enemies who get too close. Power-up weapons, including a shotgun, machine gun, and grenade launcher, appear throughout the stages. The interactive environments — bottles in saloons, crates in depots, cacti in canyons — can be destroyed for bonus points, and explosions trigger chain reactions that fill the screen with chaos.

The game is notably challenging even on normal difficulty, with patterns requiring quick reflexes and memorisation, but it is always fair — deaths feel earned, not arbitrary. In two-player co-op, which is the ideal way to experience it, the difficulty becomes a shared spectacle. Remember, you can experience this with the GamesNostalgia wrapper: just configure the emulator controllers properly.

The music by Hiroyuki Iwatsuki blends Spaghetti Western guitar with synthesised action cues, perfectly matching the game's tone. The graphics are among the most detailed on the SNES, with richly animated backgrounds and bosses that fill significant portions of the screen.

An enhanced remaster, Wild Guns Reloaded, was developed by the original team and released for PlayStation 4 in 2016 and Nintendo Switch in 2018, adding characters and stages. The original SNES version remains the cult classic it always was.