Time Crisis

Light-gun games had been in arcades for years when Namco released Time Crisis in December 1995, and its one addition changed how the genre felt. The cabinet had a pedal. Hold it down and agent Richard Miller stood up from cover to shoot; release it and he ducked back down, safe from fire and reloading. A countdown timer on each area, extended only by clearing the current fight, meant hiding had a cost, so players learned to stand, fire in bursts and drop again in a rhythm the whole arcade could hear. The gun itself kicked, with a blowback mechanism that simulated recoil. The plot sent Miller, a "One Man Army" for an agency called the V.S.S.E., to a castle on an island in the fictional republic of Sercia to rescue the president's daughter Rachel from the last heir of the old regime and his head of security, Wild Dog.

It ran on Namco's Super System 22 board and became a hit fast: the Japanese trade magazine Game Machine listed it as the most successful arcade game of the month in April 1996, and Next Generation judged it better than Sega's Virtua Cop 2 on the strength of the pedal alone. The 1997 PlayStation port shipped bundled with Namco's GunCon light gun at that peripheral's launch, and a separate Namco team, working without the arcade staff, halved the frame rate and trimmed the polygons to fit it onto the console. In place of a pedal, players stepped on a controller or pressed a button on the gun, and Electronic Gaming Monthly named it the Light Gun Game of the Year for 1997.

The console version's real gift was an entire extra mission set in a hotel that was secretly an arms factory, with branching paths depending on how fast you cleared each room. Time Crisis II reached Japanese arcades at the end of 1997 and added a second player with a second screen, and the series has continued since. But the original is the one people remember by their feet: a pedal, a plastic gun, and a crate that stopped every bullet.