ULTIMATE GUIDE: TYPHOON

Konami was the king of arcade shooters in the Eighties, with Scramble and Gradius (Nemesis) establishing the framework that other followers. Of course we’re talking about side-scrolling shooters here. When it came to vertical shooters Konami did dabble – see Mega Zone and Twinbee – but the vertical-scrolling shooter was the domain of developers like Capcom, Tecmo and Toaplan. Indeed, in 1987, when Konami was developing Typhoon, the arcades were already home to Flying Shark, 1943, Gemini Wing and Twin Cobra. Sega was also readying a new vertical shooter called Sonic Boom. For Typhoon to stand out from the crowd it would take something quite special.

Konami’s answer was to featured traditional 2D stages in which you piloted a helicopter against waves of enemy forces, and these were interspersed with into-the-screen 3D stages where you took control of a fighter jet. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the game’s producer (Koji Hiroshita) and director (Satoru Okamoto) had both previously worked on , another game that mixed playing perspectives.