"Who Shot Johnny Rock?" - Overhauled for Hypseus

Who Shot Johnny Rock? is an FMV light gun game originally released by American Laser Games in 1991. Like many of their titles, it ran on laserdisc hardware in arcades, using full-motion video to deliver a movie-like experience with live actors and pre-recorded scenes. You didn’t control a character in the traditional sense, your job was to watch the story unfold and shoot when the time was right. It was part of that early wave of "interactive movie" games, where gameplay was built around reacting quickly to on-screen events.

The game is set in a stylized version of 1930s Chicago, and you play a private detective hired to solve the murder of a nightclub singer named Johnny Rock. Your client is Red, a classic femme fatale who brings you the case and sends you off into the city’s underbelly to track down suspects. There are four main ones, all with disease-themed nicknames: Measles, Mumps, Smallpox, and Lockjaw Lil, and each with a motive. The twist is that the killer is randomly selected each time you play, so you’re never quite sure who did it until you gather all the evidence.

A physical copy of WSJR? for the Philips CD-i

As with other American Laser Games titles like Mad Dog McCree or Crime Patrol, Who Shot Johnny Rock? was eventually ported to home systems. It showed up on platforms like Sega's Mega CD, the 3DO, the CD-i, MS-DOS and many other seemingly random combinations of letters. Even as an interactive DVD game for consumer DVD players. These ports tried to bring the arcade experience home, but the video quality suffered, and the gameplay rarely translated well. Especially if you weren’t able to play with a light gun.

Footage of the Sega Mega-CD release

Fast forward to the modern day, and the game has been recreated through Singe and Hypseus, open-source engines that simulate laserdisc games on modern hardware. These versions allowed fans to revisit games like Johnny Rock without the original equipment.  Several revisions of Johnny Rock have been made over the years, but unfortunately, these have all been plagued with issues. Hitboxes that didn’t line up, unreliable inputs, and scenes that just didn't play properly to name just a few. Most versions of Johnny Rock in Singe were playable in theory, but frustrating and broken in practice.


And that’s where this latest update comes in.


LutherGond has done it again, and completely repaired the game for Hypseus and made a long list of improvements along the way. For starters, it now supports both one and two players, so you can have a go at solving the mystery with a friend. Hitboxes have been redrawn improving the hit detection and accuracy, so when you aim at a hood, your shots actually register.  And the Tommy Gun behaviour has been significantly improved.

Old fans might remember that there was an alternate "Noir" version too. Well, now this latest release has it built right in as an integrated option. You can enable Noir mode to give the entire game a black-and-white 1930s movie feel, without having to replace or modify any video files. And speaking of video files... The video itself has been reworked to reduce that overly saturated look that the earlier ports suffered from.

On top of that, countless bugs and inconsistencies have been addressed, resulting in a version that finally plays the way it was originally intended.


"Noir Mode" in Hypseus


This updated version requires Hypseus version 2.11.5 or later, so if you’re still running an older build, now is the time to update. Once everything is in place, you’ll find that Who Shot Johnny Rock? is no longer just a janky nostalgic curiosity. It’s a solid, playable FMV experience that finally does justice to the original concept.

If you’ve ever wanted to play this game the way it was meant to be played, or if you’ve tried before and gave up due to the bugs (like I did), this is the version to try. LutherGond has done an excellent job restoring this classic, and it’s well worth a look.



If you use RetroPie, Hypseus can be installed directly from RetroPie-Setup. otherwise, it is available from DirtBagXon's GitHub repo at https://github.com/DirtBagXon/hypseus-singe

All the files you need for this multiplayer version of WSJR? can be obtained from the Internet Archive:  https://tinyurl.com/wsjr2p

Support for Hypseus Singe is available from DBX's Discord server at https://discord.gg/aCt2YPae3T