Sheriff

Overview

Sheriff is an arcade shooter released by Nintendo in 1979. It was the first video game ever co-designed by their most famous producer Shigeru Miyamoto, who assisted the more experienced (at the time) lead designer Genyo Takeda. Miyamoto and Takeda combined the Wild West setting and on-foot movement of Gun Fight with the single-player horde-based action gameplay and high score mechanic of Space Invaders to create Sheriff, making it possibly the first run-and-gun shooter ever produced.

In the game, the player controls a county sheriff who must defend the town and rescue his lover from bandits. An early run-and-gun multi-directional shooter that features dual-stick controls, with one joystick for movement and another for aiming, and a large number of enemies shooting many bullets, paving the way for later dual-stick shooters such as Robotron and Geometry Wars as well as many bullet hell shooters.

Sheriff also anticipated some of the gameplay elements that Miyamoto would later popularize with Donkey Kong, including the damsel in distress plot and the use of cutscenes to progress the game's simple plot. Sheriff was the second known game to use cutscenes, released just a month after Taito's Space Invaders Part II. It was also one of the first video games to feature concepts such as a romance theme, bonus points, and continuous chiptune background music (predating Namco's more popular Rally-X by a year).

In 1980, a version of the game was released by Taito as Western Gun Part II, as a sequel to their 1975 hit Western Gun (known as Gun Fight in North America), the game which originally inspired Sheriff.