The Elevator Action Remake You’ll Never Play
By Jared Newman
Over at BoingBoing, Brandon Boyer unearths the story of an Elevator Action remake for Nintendo DS that never took off, and he’s got the concept art to prove it. If you ever played Elevator Action, either the 1983 arcade classic or its NES port, the above character concepts will probably come as a shock. The game was a fairly straightforward spy shooter, in which you collected classified documents while gunning and jump-kicking your way from the top floor of a building down to your getaway car. The real fun was in messing with your opponents, say, by luring them into an elevator shaft as the car drops and comically flattens them into pancake form, or by shooting out a light so it falls on the enemy spy’s head.
The idea of a plot, and colorful characters, was pretty foreign at the time, which makes these concepts by artist James Harvey quite bizarre. Apparently, a Taito representative contacted Harvey, seeking character designs for a pitch to bring Elevator Action back to life on the Nintendo DS. Harvey complied, coming up with North Korean team member Kim Min Ji, who attacks with a kettle of battery acid; Brussels Tibia, a “crazy white kid in a Halloween suit” who attacks with flying kicks; and Rakim Al Taff, a Muslim radical with a running clothesline attack. Yeah, I can see why this didn’t get the green light, but it’s no more a desecration of the original game than Elevator Action Returns. Below, screenshots of the original game, the sequel and all three character concepts from Harvey. [via BoingBoing]
