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Description

In the year 2631, a small meteorite has fallen into the Galuga archipelago, located 20km northeast off the coast of New Zealand. Two years later, a terrorist group known as Red Falcon has seized the island in preparation for an alien invasion. The earth's marines sent two members of their elite Contra unit, Bill Rizer and Lance Bean, to neutralize the terrorists.

As either, Bill (player 1) or Lance (player 2), the player must get to the end of each stage, shooting everything in sight, while avoiding enemy fire themselves. The player can upgrade their standard-issue rifle into one of four different weapons, including the powerful spread shot.

Alternate Titles

  • "魂斗羅" -- Japanese spelling
  • "魂斗罗" -- Chinese title (simplified)
  • "Probotector" -- European NES title
  • "Kon To Ra" -- Japanese gikun phonetic title
  • "Gryzor" -- European Arcade/Computer title

Part of the Following Groups


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Trivia

The English title of Contra comes from the way the title is phonetically displayed in Japanese, using the characters "Kon To Ra". The literal meaning behind these characters seems unimportant: "kon" means "spirit", "to" means "battle" and "ra", means some sort of cloth. Literally this would translate to something similar to "Battle Spirit Cloth". An alternate source of translation claims that the title translated is "Soul Big Dipper Gauze".

Regardless of the literal meaning, the title seems to have been written as a "gikun". What that means is that the phonetics of the title are more important than the actual meaning itself.

It has been suggested by some that the intent behind the name is even more complicated than that. "Kon To Ra" purposely chosen to sound like "Contra", a term popularly used to describe armed guerrilla forces in Central America during the 1980s.


This entry was contributed by JRK (8438), Martin Smith (64035), Servo (51486), Ben K (19178) and The Ring Hawk (675)
 

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