I’m the right age to have spent my adolescence obsessed with the arcade games of the Golden Age of Video Games, and one of my very favorites as a 17-year-old was Bally Midway’s Spy Hunter. A two-dimensional vertical-scroller involving a chase between an intensely 1983-looking protagonist in an Isdera Imperator 108i and a cast of baddies in The Switchblade (a sedan with tire-shredding attachments), The Enforcer (a stretch limousine packed with shotgun-brandishing hoodlums) and The Bullet Proof Bully (an armored SUV), Spy Hunter featured a low-fi electronic Peter Gunn soundtrack just to make the player feel cool.
After reading the well-researched piece about the Imperator 108i’s Spy Hunter role by my fellow 24 Hours of Lemons judge, Jason Torchinsky, and contemplating the over-the-top-macho advertising for Dodges of the middle 2000s, it hit me: The styling of the Dodge Nitro must have been inspired by the shape of the Bullet Proof Bully from Spy Hunter!
It’s all there. The angled slab sides, suggesting inch-thick hardened-steel armor plate. The split grille with a gunsight design. The raked windshield, to encourage projectiles to bounce off harmlessly. Sure, the Bullet Proof Bully didn’t get displayed using many pixels— maybe 25 by 60 at most— but that’s the 2007 Nitro!
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