Snatcher went on sale in 1988 with its ending missing. The people who bought it waited four years.
Konami put Snatcher on sale for the PC-8801 on 26 November 1988, and for the MSX2 on 13 December. Both versions stop at the end of Act 2, on a cliffhanger. The third act was not in the box. The reviews were good. The sales were not. What formed instead was a small number of people who kept talking about a story they had not been allowed to finish. Act 3 reached them in October 1992, on the PC Engine — four years later. And when the game finally reached English, on the Sega CD, its translator Jeremy Blaustein has said it sold a couple of thousand copies in the United States. It is a game in which you never walk anywhere. You look, you ask, and you wait. Some things are handed to you unfinished. People stayed with this one anyway.
About this game
Konami's cyberpunk adventure for the MSX2, written and designed by Hideo Kojima. It came on three floppy disks with a Konami Sound Cartridge, and it stopped at the end of Act 2, on a cliffhanger.
Key Features
Neo Kobe City, an artificial island in eastern Asia. Machines called Snatchers are killing people and taking their places, and the government has assembled a unit called JUNKER to hunt them. You play Gillian Seed, a man who has lost his memory and joins JUNKER because the only thing he knows about his own past is that it has something to do with them. You never walk anywhere. The whole game is played through a menu — look, investigate, ask, move on — and a single picture in front of you carries the rest. Gillian is issued a small robot navigator to carry with him. Its name is Metal Gear Mk. II.
The Story Behind
Kojima has said he was heavily influenced by Blade Runner (1982) and by cinema generally, and wanted to make a game with that feeling. What he was given to make it on was a home computer. The credits repay careful reading, because Snatcher is usually described simply as "a Kojima game". The MSX2 version's own credit screen lists Hideo Kojima under Scenario, and Naoki Matsui as Supervisor; Wikipedia's entry lists Matsui as director, with Kojima as writer and designer. Kojima wrote it and he designed it. He did not sign it alone, and this page does not pretend otherwise. One more disagreement in the sources, which we will leave standing rather than tidy away: the original Japanese release sets the story in 2042. The English version moved it to 2047.
Tricks & Tales
The MSX2 release is not a cartridge game. It is three 3.5-inch floppy disks plus a Konami Sound Cartridge — a cartridge carrying RAM and Konami's own SCC chip, so the game could be heard through five extra channels instead of the MSX's standard sound. A second-hand copy missing that cartridge is missing the sound of the game. JUNKER is an acronym, and it is a different acronym in each language. In Japanese it stands for "Judgement Uninfected Naked Kind and Execute Ranger"; the English release rewrote it as "Japanese Undercover Neuro Kinetic Elimination Ranger". Act 3 — the answer — is not in this version. It arrived in October 1992 on the PC Engine, four years after people first bought the game.
Collector's Guide
What to Watch Out For
Before buying, these are the points worth knowing — from someone who handles original Japanese Snatcher copies regularly.
Is Snatcher on MSX2 a cartridge?
No, and this is the thing to get right before you buy. The MSX2 release is three 3.5-inch floppy disks plus a Konami Sound Cartridge — a cartridge holding RAM and Konami's SCC sound chip. A listing offering only the disks, or only the cartridge, is not a complete copy, and a copy without the Sound Cartridge does not sound like Snatcher.
Does this version contain the whole story?
No. Both 1988 releases — PC-8801 and MSX2 — end after Act 2, on a cliffhanger. Act 3 was written for the later PC Engine version (October 1992). If you want the ending, this is not the version that has it. If you want the game as it was actually sold in 1988, this is it.
It is on floppy disks. Does that matter?
It is the part that ages. The disks themselves are perishable, and the MSX floppy drive that reads them is the machine's known weak point — the rubber belt inside perishes with time (see the MSX care guide on this site). Buy the software knowing you may be repairing the drive.
Is there an English version of this MSX2 release?
No. Snatcher's only official English release was the Sega CD version (Europe, December 1994; North America, January 1995), and that is a different, later, three-act version of the game. These disks are Japanese.
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