fourth stage having players face off against the leader of STURM, Gaste Bernard. The loss of all health results in a game over. At the end of each level, players are graded based on shooting accuracy, and health and missile stockage are automatically refilled. If players' shooting accuracy was low, a cutscene plays of the Neo Arc police chief berating Garcia and Cliff about causing almost as much damage as STURM. Development and release Steel Gunner was released by Namco for arcades, initially with a limited release on October 3, 1990, followed by a wide release in March 1991. It was the company's first light gun video game. It was produced by Kazunori Sawano, who had previously been a designer on games such as Galaxian (1979) and King & Balloon (1980). The game's light guns and arcade cabinet were designed by Namco engineer Shigeki Toyama, who is often described as the company's "Doc Brown character" for his strange yet innovative ideas. It is the final game that Toyama produced the cabinet for, and the first on which he worked directly with the game designers as a planner. The light guns originally had a much more futuristic, science fiction design to them. When Namco executives instead decided to use them for Golly! Ghost!, Toyama was forced to create new designs for the guns in two days, though having already finished fiberglass prototypes for the originals. Reception Steel Gunner was successful in arcades. In Japan, it was the eighth highest-grossing dedicated arcade game of 1991. In North America, it was the top-grossing new video game on the RePlay arcade charts in June 1991, and then the fourth top-grossing upright cabinet in July 1991. It remained among the top ten arcade games on the RePlay charts for a year through June 1992, when Steel Gunner was the eighth most popular upright arcade cabinet and tenth most-successful software conversion kit. Steel Gunner was well-received by publications, being noted for its action film-like presentation and violence. In 1991, Japanese publication Gamest awarded the game several runner-up awards based on reader votes, including "Grand Prize 9th", "Best Shooting Prize 10th", "Best Directing 6th", and "Annual Hit Game 31st". Your Commodore labeled it as "quite a good blast", and retrospectively Hardcore Gaming 101 applauded its overall presentation and quality, saying that being Namco's first light gun shooter was impressive alone. The gameplay was heavily praised, with several