When the frenetic shmup Batsugun debuted in Japan’s arcades in 1994, it marked the start of a new era for the genre. That’s not to say 2D shooters had struggled before. Far from it; they were a founding form of the medium. It was the likes of Asteroids, Spacewar! and Space Invaders that established the template of what gaming more broadly could be.
Yet it was the team at Toaplan that would elevate and modernise the genre, evolving it from the relatively primitive nature of scrolling shooters like Xevious, and towards bullet hell; a genre subset not only defined by menacing difficulty and absurdly high bullet counts, but also beguilingly elaborate scoring systems and cavernous depth.
While Toaplan was founded in 1979, the software house only moved to games in 1984, assembling a team largely formed of former Orca and Crux employees. Together they would make many iconic shmups, including Tiger-Heli, Truxton, Twin Cobra and Zero Wing. Each new shooter would demonstrate a little more of what bullet hell might be, until Batsugun gave us the first true taste of the form.
Despite numerous console ports, the creatively vibrant, famously energetic Toaplan was ultimately an arcade studio. As such, its fortunes were tied to the success of cabinet-based gaming, with the firm folding in 1994. Staff would go on to form many key shmup studios, however, including CAVE, which continues to define the shmup genre and inspire countless other games, thanks to the impact of works including DoDonPachi and Ketsui. And shmups were far from Toaplan’s only beat.
PERFORMAN
ARCADE • 1985
Made when Toaplan’s game department was still working from an apartment, marked the studio’s second arcade title. It isn’t Toaplan’s best or most influential output by any stretch. But the fledgling studio was already showing a knack for innovating existing genre templates while furnishing its projects with lavishly detailed pixel art. In fairness, lavish may be a stretch in the case of , but in its own quiet way it whispered at what was to come. It appeared loosely inspired by arcade maze titles like and , yet in giving the player the opportunity to hurl boomerangs at foes, it upped the pace and dynamism
