Konami Announces Full Contents of Contra Anniversary Collection

Konami has announced the contents of the Contra Anniversary Collection, coming soon to the PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and Steam.  The collection bundles together a dozen releases from across Contra's long history, including several alternate European and Japanese versions of games in the series, never before released in America. You can find a complete list of the games in the collection below:

• Contra (Arcade)
• Contra (NES)
• Contra (Famicom)
• Super Contra (Arcade)
• Super C (NES)
• Contra III: The Alien Wars (SNES)
• Super Probotector: Alien Rebels (SNES)
• Contra: Hard Corps (Sega Genesis)
• Probotector (Sega Mega Drive)
• Operation C (Game Boy)

Alternate European and Japanese versions of these games will come as a free update post-release. The Probotector games are in fact reskins of the Contra games released in the west and replaced the games macho action movie inspired soldier characters, Bill and Lance, with a pair of robots. This change was possibly made to make the games less violent, as destroying a robot can be seen as less destructive than a human being dying instead.

No release date has yet been announced for the collection but we will keep you posted once more information is available.

The Contra Anniversary Collection is one of three such collections released to celebrate 50th adversity as a company, alongside the previously release Castlevania Anverisry Collection and Arcade Classics Collection. You can read our take in our review of the Castlevania Collection here,

Contra was first released in arcades in 1987 and later ported to the NES in 1989, with its latest installment being Contra Hard Corps: Uprising released in 2011. The run-and-gun was known for its great difficulty and for being one of the earliest titles to feature the infamous Konami Code, which granted the player 30 lives for entering it at the game's title screen.