Run ‘N’ Gun: A History of On-Foot Shooters Review

As much as we love the Bitmap Visual Compendium and Box Art books, it’s always nice when one of their more investigative releases appear. In the past we have had a host of great volumes such as The Games That Weren’t, From Antz to Zombies and A Secret History of Mac Gaming, which aimed to make us all instant experts on overlooked areas of video game history. Run ‘N’ Gun : A History of On-Foot Shooters falls more into this latter category as it aims to take us through the origins and thematic of everything running and gunning, while unearthing a fair few overlooked gems along the way.

As we’ve come to expect the cover art for the book looks absolutely gorgeous. Adorned with two sci-fi marines blasting robots, it perfectly captures the feel of classic games in the genre such as Contra. The pages inside are no different with a good mix of screen shots and text. The consistent and thoughtful colour palette used is also well judged to fit the mood while keeping text easily visible.

Contents wise, the book is exhaustive. There are of course too many Run ‘N Gun games for everything to be covered but you are getting over four hundred and ninety-five pages of curated coverage here. This covers pretty much every system from the Atari 2600 to modern day consoles (Or Atari to ZX Spectrum if you want to keep with the alphabet theme).

With such a wide area to cover the author has taken a logical approach to cataloguing all these games. Games are listed by decade with clear section dividing 1980-1989, 1990-1999 and then three more sections dividing up the 2000’s. the book goes right up to 2023 as well so the mix of old and new is excellent and gives a huge insight into the development of the genre.

The writing itself is of an exceptionally high standard. The Book opens with a well-judged preface by Dave Cook and then two contrasting forwards from Keiji Inafune and the team behind Cuphead. Again, mixing the old and new in a logical and interesting way. This then followed by a breakdown of what elements make up the genre and a look at how it developed. From then on, it’s onto the games.

The amount of games present is impressive. Many are spread across two pages, but these inclusions are bolstered by smaller looks at games split into four. This helps give a snapshot of certain decades and years while also focusing on the more iconic and historically important ones. Each decade also has a short summation talking about how the genre work throughout it. To add some variety there are also some looks at sprite work, characters and iconic moments from games as you go through.

Overall, Run ‘N’ Gun A History of On-Foot Shooters is an extensive and great looking highlight of the excellent Bitmap books catalogue. It’s an entertaining read that begs for you to go and start finding all the games to play. It’s definitely up there with the constantly sought after Point and Click and JRPG Books and is pretty much essential for anyone interested in video games.

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