Taito’s 1980 release Steel Worker is incredibly rare and obscure, thanks to its extremely limited production run. With early arcade cabinets suffering high attrition rates, no original machines are known to survive in active collector databases anywhere in the world. Most gamers have never even heard of it, and its design hardly looks like an arcade title, resembling more like something on the ZX Spectrum. With Hamster bringing it back thanks to their Arcade Archives 2 line, what can people expect from this ancient and mysterious relic from the early 80s?
Steel Worker is a game about a determined steel worker who automatically marches from the starting platform on the left toward the exit on the right, across an unfinished steel gantry high above a dangerous drop. As the chief engineer, players must use a bottom cursor menu to place girders in real-time, creating a safe path for the worker to cross. There is not much else to it. Steel Worker is as basic as it gets. Its worth is how it innovated real-time strategy gameplay elements with the autonomous worker and players having to guide him using the appropriate girders. Its premise and gameplay are so simple that there isn’t any room for it to fail. The only problem is that it won’t hold anybody’s attention for long.
The action gets faster in the later levels, and it becomes trickier to keep the worker from falling to his death, especially with the strict limits of how many times he can be reversed. It almost feels impossible with so few reverses available, and his walking speed gets faster and faster. The pace becomes so unbearably quick that there’s barely any time to think or place the optimal girder. The core gameplay is admittedly stimulating, but it wears thin quickly since this type of game was never meant to be more than a quick and cheap thrill for a quarter.
Steel Worker is not much to look at, but its utterly stark visuals add a certain uncanny and creepy mood. The all-consuming black void backdrop, paired with the ambient, low thumping music, feels like a hypnotic metronome, punctuated by the crunchy thud of girders slamming down. In a true arcade setting, the so-called music would be completely drowned out by the loud, chaotic sounds of games like Frogger and Space Invaders. The bizarre colour choices for the minimalistic sprites brighten any dark room with a surrealist palette, which, admittedly, is one of the cooler features of Steel Worker.
