For those who are unaware, Freedom Fighter is a Laserdisc arcade game released in 1987 by a division of Malibu Grand Prix known as Millennium Game Products and developed by a number of people collectively referred to as the 999 Game Group (went into production in 1984 and testing as early as 1985 or so). The game was a Japanese-American co-production, with all the game programming/hardware, storyboards, animation directing, etc. being done in the US while the animation itself was done by Toei Animation in Japan using character designs and various shots here and there from the anime films Galaxy Express 999 and Adieu Galaxy Express 999. Both films, especially the original, are in my opinion incredibly enjoyable and highly recommended viewing. Some people erroneously claim that the game is like Cliff Hanger where it's all just reused film footage, but this is not the case. The vast majority of the footage in the game was made specifically for it, with a few shots here and there lifted from the films, mainly for scene transitions. The main thing that makes the game quite special is its use of the same Philips 22VP931 Laserdisc player as Atari's Firefox to instantaneously skip to different videos (as in, you can shoot a target on the LD video and instantly see it hit in real time in any position or pick between two paths and there's no pause whatsoever), and video expander hardware from William's Star Rider (more on that in a bit) to stretch out anamorphic widescreen video across a 4:3 display and allow the player to horizontally pan across the image in real time.
Unfortunately, the game at the moment is incredibly inaccessible due to actual cabinets being incredibly rare (only about 50 were made to begin with) and it is currently completely unemulated. It's really such a shame the game met this fate because you can tell from watching footage that it is easily one of the most well made LD games out there that really pushes the technology to the limit. I mean, Steven Spielberg liked it and had a cabinet at Amblin Entertainment (producer David Riordan mentions this), so it must be good!
There are three known versions of the game. The first going under the title 999 Interactive Movie, the second and third going under the (in my opinion far better) Freedom Fighter title. The first two used a modified William's Star Rider board set while the third for the final release uses a completely different dedicated board set. The original version using an M6809 CPU was programmed by Dan Garland, while the later M68000 based version was ported by Kelly Jones and has a number of differences.
The 999 Interactive Movie version was first discovered when it went into the possession of the son of developer James R. Huston, along with (honestly in my opinion even more exciting) the game's source code on 5.25" floppies. He posted pictures of the cabinet and the disks on Reddit. According to Brendon Zeidler, the owner of the Star Rider based Freedom Fighter cabinet and the only version that has existing footage, this non-working cabinet ended up in the hands of a collector he didn't name. I really hope the floppies get preserved, if they're IBM formatted surely you could just image them on any PC with a 5.25" drive. I don't know if Huston's son still has them or what.
I believe I first discovered the game through a video that showed an incredibly watered down port to the Philips CD-i known as Escape From CyberCity. Then I did research on it and realized it was based on Freedom Fighter and Galaxy Express 999. I was honestly blown away by the available footage and seeing how much better the arcade version is compared to the CD-i. It really bothers me how many people don't even realize the CD-i version is a far inferior port of an arcade game. Fyi, the CD-i version doesn't really do the instant video skipping like the arcade, the animation is much more static due to hardware limitations without the DVC, and over half of the content was removed for the same reason (all the scenes with lots of camera motion).
Off and on over the course of over 5 years I would post my various findings on the game to the forum of a site called Dragon's Lair Project. I really wanted there to be more documentation out there on the game because there's something about it that I just find so fascinating and really didn't want it to become more and more forgotten. Unfortunately, the site's host encountered a ransomware attack and while the site itself is back, all forum content was lost. I want to repost what I can remember from there here along with potential new stuff because this is the most fitting other forum for such a topic. The main thing is a short Q&A I did with the game's animation director, Chuck/Charles Swenson in 2017, which thankfully I backed up and will be the next thing I post here soon. I'll try to post stuff in larger blocks so that it isn't too spammy. Also, Matt Ownby and Brendon Zeidler actually did more recently a video interview with producer David Riordan that was summarized here, though Matt hasn't released the footage.
If you want to learn more for now, there's also a TCRF article on the game and I updated the MobyGames entry to include the credits for the Star Rider version.
To end this post off here's pictures of the 999 Interactive Movie cabinet and source disks:
And finally some pictures of a working at the time (BZ said this cabinet stopped working) and the only in-action images you'll find of a dedicated cabinet with a replacement marquee that I thankfully grabbed before the DLP forum was lost:
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Info on Freedom Fighter by Millennium Game Products/999 Game Group
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