Contra's Bill and Lance are... Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone
Back in the '80s, game developers were a lot less shy about lifting their inspiration from movies. Games about Rambo, for example, were all over the place, but with non-actionable names like Ikari Warriors and Last Alert. But the Contra series - and the first game in particular - is the only game we've ever seen that brazenly rips off Rambo, Predator and Aliens all in one fell swoop.
Of course, you don't see the Aliens stuff until late in the game, but you meet heroes Bill Rizer and Lance Bean right off the bat, and it's pretty obvious from their cigar-chomping, shirtless-commando ways that they're intended as thinly veiled versions of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, respectively. It might not be obvious from, say, looking at a screenshot, but a quick glance at the game's box art (which all but traces Ahnuld's pose on the poster for Predator) or its NES title screen should erase any doubts.
Really, though, we can't blame the game's publisher, Konami, for doing what they did. When Contra came to arcades in 1987, Stallone and Schwarzenegger were the most awesome things to ever happen to action movies, and who wouldn't want that kind of coolness associated with their game? What we don't get is how, after paying such thorough "homage" to the facehuggers and general design aesthetic of Aliens, Konami scored a license to produce games based on the movie. Maybe the studio was just too impressed to sue - we know we would've been.
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