30 Years Ago Hideo Kojima’s Early Classic Snatcher Received Its Only Official American Release
In a vacuum Snatcher doesn’t have that odd of a history. It was critically well received in Japan upon its initial release, and it kept receiving ports and remakes on more powerful hardware for a decade afterward thanks to a strong cult following. Snatcher didn’t make a splash whatsoever with its international release, however, and was promptly… well… saying it was “forgotten” isn’t really accurate, because you have to have been known to have been forgotten. This story is one shared by many, many games, and is unremarkable sans context.
Snatcher isn’t a game in a vacuum or without context, though. It’s an early game from Hideo Kojima, first released for the PC-98 and MSX2 computers in Japan in 1988. It developed a cult following because it’s a great game—now considered an all-timer in the adventure genre as well as a cyberpunk classic—and then Konami kept giving it new opportunities to show as much to new audiences because of that. (You have to remember that the Konami you think of today isn’t the same as the one that used to push a game like Snatcher—there’s a reason their shift bothers so many people who remember how they Used To Be, and their trying again and again with Snatcher simply because they knew it was great is a reminder of that.)
You play as Gillian Seed, who, along with his wife, has lost his memory. His job in this near-future dystopia is as a detective looking for, rather than replicants, Snatchers. While the replicants of Blade Runner were humanoids trying to pass as humans and attempting to evade the law, Snatchers are replacing existing humans for a plot you’ll spend your time trying to reveal as Gillian gets deeper and deeper into his cases and the why of them all. You’ll navigate his job, his personal life, his attempts at trying to remember who he used to be, and a cyberpunk world in decline, all while he has to suspect even those he sees every day of his life of no longer being themselves. It’s a game that very easily could have been derivative, given its clear influences and homages, but the team behind it was talented enough to create something original and worthy of those influences. What we got was an adventure game full of memorable characters, some beautiful art, a killer soundtrack, and a cyberpunk tale worth experiencing, all of which has remained true for over three decades now.
The PC-98 and MSX2 were just the start for Snatcher. The game was notorious for its length and scope—for the time and the genre, anyway—to the point that, when it was time to bring it to consoles, only platforms with CD-ROM technology were even considered. In 1992, the PC-Engine Super CD-ROM² received the first console port, with a number of enhancements, and later, Japanese Sega Saturn and Playstation owners got a shot at Snatcher, as well, in 1996. Konami still thinks fondly enough of the game to this day, as they included it on the PC Engine Mini console—it’s available on the Turbografx-16 Mini, as well, since they (mostly) share a library, but you need to be able to read Japanese to play it, since it appears in its original form there.
Which brings us to December of 1994 and the lone English-language release of Snatcher. The Sega CD (known as the Mega CD in Europe, owing to the Genesis being called the Mega Drive there like in Japan) was the home of that solitary Snatcher release to come out of Japan, and Konami went all-in on it. It built on and further refined the PC Engine CD-ROM port of the game, cleaned up some potential legal issues by doing things like removing Kamen Rider from the game’s bar and replacing those kinds of characters with Konami ones, mercifully changing the age of one character from 14 to 18, adding in some lightgun segments for those who had the necessary peripheral for the Genesis, and included full voice acting to go along with the new English script. Impressive voice acting for 1994, as well: sometimes it can sound a little goofy or over the top, sure, but it all works in the universe the game is sharing with you, so you’re never taken out of the experience by it. It’s much more the LucasArts style of hammy than Resident Evil, let’s put it that way.
The takeaway here is that Konami spent a considerable amount of time and energy and money on this English-language version of Snatcher, and for their trouble, the game sold… maybe 2,000 copies in the largest territory it was released in? That’s not a typo. Junker HQ, a site dedicated to various Kojima games, interviewed one of the version’s translators, Jeremy Blaustein, about the game in 2007, and Blaustein said that it “only sold a couple thousand units at most in the US.” The Sega CD was a quality peripheral in terms of capabilities, but it just didn’t sell, which inherently limited the potential customer pool. Worldwide, the Sega CD moved 2.24 million units for a console with over 35 million in sales, which is to say that Nintendo sold more copies of Mario Paint with the SNES Mouse than Sega managed to sell CD add-ons. Making a game for the Sega CD was already risky enough, but in 1994? Two years after its North American release, when Sega was already shifting focus toward the 32X and the Saturn as they overcrowded their own market with expensive options? Throw in that adventure games weren’t exactly the most popular genre on the planet by this point, either—even the aforementioned LucasArts had made a real push towards more action games by ‘94—and you can see how Snatcher failed.
The real mistake here was likely in not using the existing assets—translation, voice acting, and so on—for at least bringing over the Playstation version of the game and giving Snatcher another shot with English-speaking audiences, but Konami, instead, decided to forego that. They also didn’t release another Kojima adventure game, Policenauts, in North America following the Snatcher debacle, even though that title appeared on the 3DO, Saturn, and PlayStation in Japan, and not just home computers. And this remained not just true after the massive worldwide success of Metal Gear Solid on the Playstation, but to this day: the only way to play Policenauts in English is through an unofficial translation. Policenauts is a lot of fun and all, but if you had to pick one, it should be Snatcher. Konami ended up choosing neither, as far as post-Sega CD goes.
Snatcher might have received an official English release, but it’s just about as difficult to get your hands on as a version of Policenauts that doesn’t even exist. The thing about selling a “couple thousand” copies is that there aren’t many to go around. So, a loose disc of Snatcher will run you about $600 secondhand. A complete version of the game goes for over $1,200 right now. If you happen to run into a brand new copy—hey, more were made than were sold, so about one per year ends up moved—you’re talking over $2,200. It’s an absolute travesty that Snatcher wasn’t included on the Sega Genesis Mini 2, considering that one of its selling points was the inclusion of Sega CD games, and there’s no bigger Sega CD rarity than Snatcher. Maybe Sega will be sure to include it on the Sega Genesis Mini 3—hey, it’s not like they’ve got many 32X games to even fill this hypothetical up with, if they decided to use that as the hook. Why not lure us in with Snatcher, too?
Simply being rare isn’t a reason to care about Snatcher, however. It’s truly excellent. The most effective way to describe it is that it’s like going back in time to see what Hideo Kojima was up to in film school—not a perfect analogy, given he was making this professionally and it wasn’t his first game by any means, but the truth is that there’s more of what Kojima would be in the future inside of Snatcher, including but not limited to Metal Gear, than there was in even the first entry in that series, which had begun a year prior. The references and adulation for films and creators and characters and tropes that he loves. The goofball characters, the mature writing with plenty of interspersed bits that make you roll your eyes, but at least in an endearing way. Snatcher could not be more obviously a love letter to Blade Runner and Terminator and Akira if it tried, but it does a fine job of paying tribute to them all while blending them together into something new that you don’t even mind how unsubtle it all is. Oh, and even though Snatcher is basically an eight-hour game, there’s a 30-minute block of exposition that reveals twists and turns and background and explanations right at the climax of the game. As said: this game told you who Kojima and his teams were going to become.
The chances of it ever being re-released in English aren’t nonexistent, since an official version of it does exist, but you wouldn’t want to bet a meaningful amount of money on it happening. And although that’s a true shame, it’s also not a completely lost piece of videogame history. If you’re curious about it, you can certainly find a way to play Snatcher in English, just like those curious about another “missing” piece of Hideo Kojima’s history in Policenauts found a way to play that game. And if you do? You’ll be glad that you did, because Snatcher is so much more than “just” an early bit of Kojima that laid out his future. It’s a hell of a game in its own right.
Marc Normandin covers retro videogames at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Twitter at @Marc_Normandin.