Special Criminal Investigation (SCI), released by Taito Corporation Japan in 1989 for arcades, arrived during a golden era of driving and action games that were pushing the boundaries of cabinet hardware. It served as a spiritual successor to Taito's own Chase H.Q. (1988), building directly on that game's high-speed police pursuit formula and expanding it with new mechanics and a fresh visual presentation. By 1989, the arcade market was saturated with fast-paced action titles, and Taito responded by delivering a game that blended the thrill of vehicular pursuit with on-foot gunplay, giving players a more dynamic and layered experience than its predecessor offered.
In SCI, players take on the role of police officers Tony Gibson and Raymond Broady, tasked with chasing down dangerous criminals across a series of time-limited stages. The core gameplay loop revolves around high-speed car chases: players steer a turbocharged sports car at breakneck speeds, weaving through traffic and closing the gap on a fleeing criminal vehicle. The controls are straightforward — a steering wheel, accelerator, and brake pedal on the dedicated cabinet — but mastering the handling requires learning how to drift around corners and manage the turbo boost, which is available in limited bursts and must be used strategically to close distance on the target. Unlike a pure racing game, the objective is not to cross a finish line but to ram the criminal's car repeatedly until it is disabled, all within a strict countdown timer.
What distinguished SCI from Chase H.Q. was the addition of a shooting mechanic. Players are equipped with a gun and can fire at the target vehicle to wear it down more quickly, adding a layer of offensive strategy to the pursuit. Ammunition is finite, so players must balance aggressive shooting with careful resource management. The shooting is handled via a button on the cabinet, and timing shots while simultaneously managing the car's speed and direction creates a satisfying dual-task challenge that kept players engaged beyond simple driving skill.
The game is structured across multiple stages, each set in a different environment — highways, city streets, and other locales — with a distinct criminal target to pursue in each. Successfully stopping a target advances the player to the next stage, while failing to do so within the time limit ends the run. Between stages, brief narrative cutscenes delivered context for each mission, a feature that was relatively novel for arcade action games of the period and helped give SCI a cinematic quality that resonated with players raised on action films of the late 1980s.
Visually, SCI used a pseudo-3D sprite-scaling technique common to Taito's hardware of the era, producing a smooth sense of speed that impressed arcade-goers at the time. The soundtrack was energetic and complemented the urgency of the chases well. In its era, SCI was well-received as a worthy follow-up to Chase H.Q., praised for its added depth and the satisfying feedback loop of its pursuit-and-disable gameplay. It was ported to several home platforms in the early 1990s, bringing the arcade experience to a wider audience and cementing its place in the late-1980s action game canon.
