Sly Spy

Players control a secret agent through eight different stages of varying gamelay. At the start of the game, players shoot enemies horizontally while sky-diving. The second half of the first, third, fifth, sixth and eighth stages are played in a run and gun format similar to Namco's Rolling Thunder and its sequels, but it lacks the ability to jump between the top and bottom floors while grabbing rails. Also, when out of ammo or attacked by a boss with one hit, Sly Spy drops his firearm while the game becomes a beat'em up in 2D platform manner, much like Shinobi.

Players can make Sly Spy do three different kicks: high kicks, low kicks and jump kicks. The second stage shows Sly Spy riding on his motorcycle with a built-in machine gun, which makes this stage a combination of run-and-gun and vehicular combat games. The fourth and seventh stages are in marine-based, side-scrolling shooter format. Minor enemies drop several different items when defeated, such as extra ammo, cans of Coca-Cola-esque soda and machine guns.

Sometime during the nineties, the president and his wife attend to a ceremony at the White House in Washington, D.C., greeting and waving to the crowd, when terrorists, armed and dangerous, some of them using jetpacks, come by close. The screen goes red and gunshots can be heard, in what seems to be an assassination attempt against them both.

Hours after the incident, a secret agent (whose code number can be determined by the player at the very start of the game) is informed that a massive wave of terrorists is invading the city by all sides. They belong to "Council for World Domination" (CWD), a secret underground syndicate very reminiscent of SPECTRE from the Bond movies. The invasion of the city is just their first move on their campaign to take over the world.

In Japan, Game Machine listed Sly Spy on their August 15, 1989 issue as being the fifth most-successful table arcade unit of the month.

Several references from Data East's other arcade games made cameo appearances in Sly Spy. A poster showing Chelnov (a.k.a. Atomic Runner) can be seen at the beginning of Stage 3, the logo for the aforementioned Bad Dudes can be seen at the end of Stage 3, and a poster showing Karnov can be seen at the beginning of Stage 5. In the 1990 film RoboCop 2, officer Duffy gets pushed by RoboCop into a Bad Dudes arcade cabinet, but with Sly Spy built into it. Along with a few other Data East arcade games, they appeared in the film due to licensing and advertising agreements between Orion Pictures, Data East and Ocean Software after the release of two video games based on the RoboCop property.

In 2010, G-Mode and G1M2 added the arcade game to Data East Arcade Classics as Secret Agent.