Elevator Action Famicom Menko Card: A 1985 Licensed Taito Collectible from Japan's Golden Age of Character Cards
What This Card Is
This is a circular menko card (known in Japanese as maru-menko) bearing the official copyright notice © TAITO CORP. 1985, making it a licensed piece of merchandise tied to Taito’s classic arcade-turned-Famicom game, Elevator Action. Menko cards are thick paper cards rooted in a traditional Japanese children’s game, and by the 1980s a whole category of character-themed versions had emerged — printed with imagery from popular video games and anime and sold at candy shops and toy stores across Japan. This card falls squarely into that tradition. The copyright date of 1985 aligns with the Famicom (Nintendo Family Computer) release of Elevator Action that same year, suggesting it was produced as part of the merchandise wave that accompanied the game’s home console launch. The manufacturer of the card itself is not confirmed from the information available — in this era, Taito and other IP holders typically licensed the menko format out to small and mid-size paper toy manufacturers.
The card’s artwork depicts a multi-story building with elevator action scenes, in keeping with the game’s visual identity. On the left side of the card, the kanji for fox (kitsune) and a peace sign illustration appear — these are yaku marks, a standard design element in menko that indicate a card’s rank or role within a set’s game rules. Such rankings varied from product to product and had no universal standard.
Elevator Action and Its World
Elevator Action was developed and published by Taito Corporation and originally released as an arcade game in 1983. Players control a spy navigating a tall building downward, using elevators and staircases to evade and eliminate black-suited enemy agents while collecting classified documents from red doors. The game’s mix of vertical action and tactical movement made it a hit both in Japanese arcades and internationally. When the Famicom port launched in 1985, it came with television advertising and strong name recognition — at the time, Taito was already one of Japan’s most prominent game companies, globally famous for Space Invaders. The game also reached Western markets on the NES and in arcades, giving it a fanbase well beyond Japan.
The game’s protagonist is Agent 17, a spy character who appears without a named identity in the original game but has been referred to by that designation in later materials. Enemy characters are the unnamed black-suited antagonists scattered throughout the building’s floors.
Why Collectors Worldwide Pay Attention to Character Menko
Menko has roots going back to the Edo period in Japan — the original game involved slapping cards onto a surface to flip an opponent’s card over. By the mid-Showa era, that competitive format had given way to a collecting culture, and by the late 1970s and through the 1980s, character menko featuring video game and anime imagery were everywhere in Japanese candy shops. They existed in the same cultural moment as Bikkuri Man stickers and Corocoro Comic tie-in goods — paper collectibles that now represent a distinct category of Showa Retro memorabilia.
Because these cards were distributed only within Japan and produced in the context of a domestic toy market, they never reached Western shelves. International collectors who grew up playing Elevator Action in arcades or on the NES encounter this type of merchandise as a genuinely Japan-exclusive artifact from the franchise’s earliest years. The combination of a full-color circular format, official Taito copyright marking, and a recognizable classic game title gives this card a clear place in the broader history of 1980s Japanese video game merchandise.
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