Data East was an arcade powerhouse. The company churned out classic hit after classic hit, many of which had found new life on the Switch thanks to FTE Games for a time before the games were delisted. One title that caught my eye was Sly Spy — and as a longtime James Bond fan, it hit close to home. I’ve always loved Bond video games, from the legendary GoldenEye on N64 to a Game Boy title I still remember fondly. But one gap always nagged at me: Bond never got a proper arcade game, right when arcades were at their peak. Well, Sly Spy managed to be that unofficially.
Make no mistake, Sly Spy is a James Bond game in everything but name, and it’s exactly the kind of game I always wanted to see. I only discovered the game back when it was released on the Switch, and this is a game I would have loved during the arcade era. Gameplay-wise, this is Bad Dudes with a gun. Ammo is limited, and once it runs out, you’re back to kicks, just like in Bad Dudes. Thankfully, ammo pickups are generous enough that this rarely becomes a problem, aside from one boss fight that keeps knocking the gun out of your hand. The vehicle and underwater levels also deserve a mention — normally these are not my favourite genre staples, but Data East nailed them here, and I found myself enjoying every minute.
And the Bond DNA runs deep. Two bosses are unmistakably stand-ins for Jaws and Oddjob, and the best weapon in the game, which you need to collect pieces to assemble for a short time, is the Golden Gun. Honestly, it’s wild that Data East went this far with an unofficial Bond game and got away with it clean. It is very unlikely a game like this simply would be possible today without a major lawsuit necessitating changes.
That said, it’s not flawless. The life system is punishingly limited, and while you can feed it more credits, the whole setup feels clunky rather than satisfying. I understand the quarter-muncher design philosophy, but this pushes it further than it needs to. The bigger issue is the hit detection: attacks don’t always connect the way they should, and more than once I ate a hit that should have been avoidable. It’s a real flaw, and one that likely held the game back in its day — but it doesn’t kill my love for it.
Sly Spy never got a western console release, though it did land on European home computers and the Commodore 64, which may explain why it flew under the radar in North America, although it did come to the Data East Arcade Classics collection on the Wii . The Johnny Turbo’s Arcade Release on the Switch and PC has since been delisted, but the game has seen an Evercade release as well. If you like classic arcade games, and wish you could have played a James Bond arcade game, then Sly Spy is for you.