1942 is a vertically scrolling shoot 'em up made by Capcom that was released for the arcade in 1984. It was the first game in the 19XX series. It was followed by 1943: The Battle of Midway.
1942 is set in the Pacific theater of World War II. The goal is to reach Tokyo and destroy the entire Japanese air fleet. The player pilots a plane dubbed the "Super Ace" (but its appearance is clearly that of a Lockheed P-38 Lightning). The player has to shoot down enemy planes; to avoid enemy fire, the player can perform a roll or "loop-the-loop". During the game the player may collect a series of power-ups, one of them allowing the plane to be escorted by two other smaller fighters in a Tip Tow formation. There were few enemies: Kawasaki Ki-61s, Mitsubishi A6M Zeros and Kawasaki Ki-48s. The boss plane is a Nakajima G8N.
The game was later ported to the NES (developed by Micronics), MSX, NEC PC-8801, Windows Mobile Professional, and Game Boy Color. It was ported by the European games publisher Elite Systems to the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. The game was included as part of Capcom Classics Collection for the Xbox and PlayStation 2 in 2005. The arcade version was released on the Wii Virtual Console in Japan on December 21, 2010, the PAL region on January 21, 2011, and in North America on January 24, 2011.
