Gumshoe (video game)

Gumshoe is a light gun shooter video game developed and published by Nintendo for the VS. System arcade hardware and the Nintendo Entertainment System console. It was released in 1986 in North America and in 1988 in Europe. Unusual for a Nintendo game, it was not released in Japan. It was designed by Yoshio Sakamoto.

Plot
Mr. Stevenson is an ex-FBI agent turned detective. He receives a ransom note from a mafia boss, King Dom, who has kidnapped Stevenson's daughter, Jennifer. Stevenson must collect five "Black Panther diamonds" within 24 hours in order to see his daughter again.

Gameplay
Mr. Stevenson walks continuously to the right and will jump if shot with the NES Zapper. The player must also shoot enemies as they appear on screen. Shooting Mr. Stevenson to make him jump will not subtract from the player's ammunition. Shooting obstacles, or an empty area, however, will subtract one bullet from the total. Grabbing red balloons will add bullets to Mr. Stevenson's arsenal.

Gumshoe contains four levels, and each level includes a secret bonus area that can be accessed by attaining at least twenty balloons before passing the section of the level that transitions into the bonus area.

Release
The release date changed several times. It was first scheduled for June 1986, was later changed to August 1986, but actually released in September.

Reception
In a 2015 article for Uproxx, Nathan Birch ranked Gumshoe as the worst of the NES black box releases, criticizing its game mechanics and its "instant-kill pits", while calling it "one of those lousy Zapper games where you have to protect a dumbass character who trudges forward constantly, oblivious to the dangers around them." In 2023, Garrett Martin of Paste ranked Gumshoe fourth on a list of the NES's eighteen Zapper games. Martin called Gumshoe the "weirdest" and "most fascinating" game on the list but also the most difficult, writing, "it's so hard that most will probably lose interest before finishing the first stage."

In 2013, Simon Parkin of IGN included Gumshoe on a list of the ten "best, most important, most interesting or most unusual lesser-known titles" by famous video game developers. Parkin noted that Gumshoe represented Yoshio Sakamoto's interest in exploring "murky, foreboding scenarios" that contrasted with other Nintendo games. Calling it "one of the most curious genre mash-ups of the era", he wrote that the game's combination of the Zapper with platforming gameplay "demonstrates Sakamoto’s restless creativity" and considered the game notable as "an early precursor to the so-called Endless Runner that has found huge popularity on iOS in recent years."