Original Twitter Upload Date: February 16, 2022. The script below was originally posted to DA on February 25, 2022, and has been revised to add story context and fix keyboard errors present in the original version.
[The Tetrad are approaching the arcade, dressed in Victorian-era attire. Gilda looks excited to enter]
Margo: “Ugggggh! I hate this outfit! It’s so heavy and itchy and… British-feeling!”
April: “Ah loove it. Makes meh feel like a ladeh. Ah knoo what ah’m wearin’ fer All Hehloo’s. Dinnae ken what it’s gotta dae wit’ th’ ahcade, thoo.”
Wendy: “Yeah, seriously, Gilda. Why did you make us dress like this? You know how I feel about being a blonde!”
Gilda: “Like a prettier and cooler version of me?”
Wendy: “Yeah! Like a prettier and –” [blushes, smirks, and lightly punches Gilda’s shoulder] “Oh, you flatterer.”
Gilda: “Heheh, even with your cheeks made up I can see them flushing.” [pokes Wendy’s cheek; Wendy smiles] “Anyways, the reason I wanted us all to dress like this is because I wanted us to get into the mood for the cabinet that just came in.”
Margo: “Cabinet? You brought us here to look at furniture?!”
Wendy: “No, Margo. Cabinet like arcade cabinet. Machines for arcade games are called cabinets.”
Margo: “Really? Are you sure they’re not just ‘machines’?”
Wendy: “Yes.”
April: “E’en ah knew they’re called cabinets. An’ I play vidayah gehms less ‘an a quartah o’ th’ time Gilleh daes!”
Margo: “Cabinet, machine, whatever. Gil, whatever game you’re gonna show us, it better be one we all can play. And I don’t mean taking turns, I mean together. All of us!”
Gilda: [pushing door into arcade open] “Well, Mar, Dub Dub, Scotty. Just you follow me in and see.”
April: “Whatever ye seh, Luigi!”
Margo: “Luigi?”
April: “’cause she’s Istallion an’ wears green.”
Margo: “Oh.” [she and April chuckle]
[The Tetrad walk into the arcade; Gilda leads them to the arcade cabinet she’s excited to play.]
Gilda: “Okay, here it is, girls. Sunset Riders! The four-player masterpiece from Konami!”
Margo: “Oh yeah, I think I’ve heard of this one. Isn’t there a version on Sega Genesis that’s –“
Gilda: “THERE IS NO VERSION ON SEGA GENESIS!” [Margo covers mouth] “If you guys are familiar with Contra, this game plays very similarly. Except it’s set in the Wild West. Which is why I wanted us all to dress like this. It matches the time period of the game’s setting.”
Margo: [pouting] If I knew this was a Wild West-themed game, I’d has dressed as a cowdoe.”
April: “Ah, shut yer geggeh, Mahgo. Sapphires look bonneh oan ye an’ ye knoo they dae.” [repeatedly flicks one of Margo’s earrings; Margo grabs April’s tail and tickles her nose with it, causing her to sneeze] “Li’l bastid!” [raises hand to slap Margo, only for Wendy to grab her and Margo’s hands]
Wendy: “That’s enough, you two!” [throws Margo’s and April’s fists into each other’s faces]
Gilda: [applauding] “Very good, Wendy. Just for that, I’ll let you choose first which player you want to be.”
Wendy: “Player one! I choose player one!”
Gilda: “Player one? Are you sure?”
Wendy: “You said I could choose which player I want to be, right? I choose player one! What, you got a problem with not being player one?”
Gilda: “No, I don’t. But that’s the controller for Steve. He only shoots two bullets at once. Trust me, you want to be either player three or four, Bob or Cormano. They’re the most fun to play as, they fire a whole spread of bullets and –” [Margo and April quickly take the controls for Bob and Cormano; Gilda facepalms] “My big mouth.”
Wendy: “Ah, let ’em take them, Gil. I prefer to be challenged anyway.”
Gilda: “You know what? Good thinking, Wendy. So do I. It’s Billy time!” [takes the controls for Billy; Wendy takes them for Steve]
April: “Ye got quahtahs, Gilda?”
Gilda: “Four for each of us. Four credits each. Same as the maximum allowed on Super Nintendo.” [takes sixteen quarters out of a reticule and gives four each for herself and the rest of the Tetrad] “Any extra credits are on you.”
Margo: “Fine by me. I always bring like a hundred quarters with me when I come here anyway.”
Gilda: “Good luck playing the console version, then. If you ever do.” [the Tetrad insert their quarters into the machine] “YEE-HAW! Let’s go!”
This artwork has been a long time coming. I started drawing it in November of 2021, around the time I posted Strolling Victoria-sly in ye Ole Part o’ Town, and before I redesigned Margo to have glasses and shorter hair. So if she looks closer to her older design here, that’s why. Because I originally drew her asset with that older design in mind. After retconning Margo’s design, I did add small, Victorian-style glasses to her asset, being prepared just in case I decided to finish to this artwork. However, I ended up not revisiting the PSD for several months afterward, and thought of deleting it.
That is, until the recent HBO series, The Gilded Age, premiered. My mother recently got into the show, having been recommended it to her by my ex-girlfriend’s mother, who lives near where the show was filmed. Around the time she started watching it, I decided to do some research on the Gilded age. Not the show, but the time period… which, after doing some research, I’ve learned is comprised of the latter decades of the Victorian era, and, like many time periods, the exact years are debated. The years that make the most sense to me, though, and what I’m going to go with, is 1865 (the end of the Civil War and beginning of Reconstruction in the United States) to 1901 (the assassination of William McKinley and the death of Queen Victoria). Since Gilda’s Victorian outfit was designed with the year 1887 in mind, I felt stupid for not knowing that ‘the Gilded age’ is a term for the latter Victorian era. Had I known at the time I drew the original Victorian Gilda piece, I definitely would have made the ‘Gild-ed age’ pun. But then I remembered that I had this artwork saved… which meant I still had an opportunity to make the pun. So I took it.
Yep. That’s the reason this artwork exists. For the purpose of making a stupid pun. And also because the idea of drawing the Tetrad playing a game famous for supporting four-player play was too good to pass up.
Anyways… onto the artwork. Actually, on my opinion on Sunset Riders, for those that need a refresher.
The version of Sunset Riders I played first, was the Sega Genesis version, the first Konami game on a Sega platform. And as you could probably tell from me using Gilda as a voice for my opinion in the introductory transcript, I do not think highly of that version of the game. It shows very clearly that Konami was unfamilar with the Genesis hardware, and basically thought that developing for the system was like the NES with more colors. The game was released on a 4-megabit (512KB) cartridge, pitifully small for a fourth-gen system in 1992, especially with some games like Streets of Rage 2 coming in as large as 16 megabits (2048KB/2MB). 4-meg carts were mostly relegated to single-screen puzzle games such as Columns III and Zoop by the middle of the fourth generation. So imagine trying to make a run-and-gun as famously colorful and sprite-heavy as Sunset Riders in such a small amount of space.
You can’t. So what you get out of the port, is a game that should be regarded as Sunset Riders in name only, with none of what makes the arcade original so acclaimed. Dull visuals, only two playable characters (Billy and Cormano), half the bosses being removed… basically, it’s a port that only does the bare minimum to be called Sunset Riders. If even that. But I could forgive all the cut content if the game was at least playable. But Sunset Riders on Genesis truly does play like an NES game, with all the traps and cheap deaths people hate about run-and-gun games from the third generation. The original arcade game based much of its difficulty on one-hit deaths, and that carried into the Genesis version as well. But here, it was handled much worse. The bullets don’t flash like they did in the arcade version, and I swear there’s more of them as well. This makes the bullets hard to see and even harder to dodge, and will waste you entire continues just to get through one stage, even if you set the life count higher in the options.
Sega Genesis Sunset Riders is a game that really could’ve used infinite continues, in tandem with sending you back to the beginning of the level once you lose the continue’s last life. But no. You get five continues, and once they’re gone, you’re back to the title screen. The game even lets you keep going right where you left off when you use a continue, as if the devs knew how cheap the game was and tried to save face by making it seem less cheap than it really is. I mean, come on. I know Contra had limited continues, but Castlevania and Tiny Toon Adventures had a continue system that worked like I just described above. This game really could’ve used that if they were gonna make the game this cheap with its difficulty.
The soundtrack I will admit is a redeeming quality of this version; the tracks here are slightly-scaled-back versions of those in the arcade version, mostly removing the samples and leaving just the synthesized bits. I don’t miss the samples too much though, they’re the least of the cuts made to the port, and the tracks sound perfectly fine without them. But that’s about all I have to say positive about the Genesis version of Sunset Riders. Outside of the soundtrack, it’s a dull-looking, unbalanced port that should only be regarded as Sunset Riders in name, and makes the hardware it’s running on look weaker than it actually is.
Several months after the porting disaster on Sega Genesis, Sunset Riders would be ported to the SNES… with much better results! This time, the game was put on a proper-sized 8-megabit (1024KB/1MB) cartridge, much more appropriate for a game of its genre and era. This version still recieved cuts; not all the level layouts are one-to-one, the scaling sprites are gone, and although all four playable characters are present, it still only goes up to two players. I can forgive the last part since there wasn’t any multitap for the system at the time, but this port still would’ve been a good opportunity for Konami to make one.
But these minor cuts aside, the SNES version of Sunset Riders is the superior home console port by far. It’s just as colorful, the bullets actually flash again, Steve and Bob are added back in, all the bosses are here (and with their spoken dialogue that was also cut from the Genesis version!), it redeems itself for all the sins the Genesis version committed, as well as being as great a port the SNES could possibly offer. Minus… still limited continues. But I’m willing to overlook that. I prefer how the continues work here anyway, them sending you back to the beginning of the level when used. Call it artificial difficulty, I say sending you back to a checkpoint/beginning of the level should be how continues/lives should work anyway.
Unfortunately, for some reason, neither home console port of Sunset Riders saw release in Japan. Which is strange considering both versions were developed in the country. I wonder what it was about the game that made them think the Japanese wouldn’t like it.
As for this artwork, aside from it being months in the making, there isn’t much to be said. The crazed expressions the Tetrad are making I thought up late into the linework process, I had this fun idea that certain cartoonish faces run in the families of the Grunvaliverse. The Grimes and the giant, bloodshot eyes, the Hyndes and the Invader Zim-inspired eyes and teeth, the Wylers and the target eyes and angular smile, and the Lowrys and flushed faces. Of course there’s more than this, and sometimes there’s overlap, but these are the cartoonish faces I’m establishing as the main face for each family here. On a side note, Ezmanify stated in a Twitter chatroom that the Tetrad here look like they’re going insane. And to that I say, well, that’s what playing Sunset Riders does to you. It’s a very difficult game that, considering how often death comes in the game, is made for multiplayer, multiple players to get through and suffer through together. It has the kind of difficulty that can indeed drive someone insane. And there’s no first few easy stages like in Battletoads or Ninja Gaiden; Sunset Riders is relentless from the moment you start playing.
Finally, that “IT’S TIME TO PAY.” text you see on the bottom of the screen? That’s not pixel art. That’s an actual asset from the SNES version of Sunset Riders. I played the game on the BizHawk emulator up to the point where it shows up (at the beginning of the Simon Greedwell battle), took a screenshot, erased the area around the text in GIMP, and finally, scaled it up in such a way that the sharpness of the pixels would be kept. It’s a touch I thought any fan of the game that came across this artwork would appreciate, even if the text wasn’t present in the arcade version, which is the one being played here.
And that’ll be all for this artwork. Until next time, take care, stay safe, get vaccinated, reject crypto, and have a good one.
Check out the blooper thread for this artwork here!
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Grunvale/OTOG is owned by me. You’re free to draw fanart of it, as long as you link me to it.
Sunset Riders is owned by Konami.
Dragon’s Lair is owned by Don Bluth.
This artwork was made at a resolution of 5076×2160 (aspect ratio 2.35:1).
The Gallery of Stormy Adler 