Re-release this: Bosconian

Not as heavy of a commercial hitter as much of Namco's early 80s output, but a classic arcade title that deserves a standalone release all the same.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Such was Namco’s early 1980s output that a game that thrived in arcades, spawned a number of sequels, influenced other games within its genre, and helped to push said genre forward was seen as merely a success rather than as revelatory. Bosconian is a great shoot ‘em up from the early days of the genre during the golden age of arcade games, but it didn’t become the kind of international sensation that Galaxian, Pac-Man, or Galaga did, nor did it ascend to the levels of some of the Namco classics that followed like Dig Dug or Xevious.

Still, though, Bosconian was a hit in Japan where it released first and became the seventh highest-grossing arcade game of 1981, and it’s also not difficult to see why it was “merely” seventh: a few of the games ahead of it were Donkey Kong (released in 1981 as well), Pac-Man (1980), Qix (also 1981), and Galaga (1981, again). Bosconian released in November, was up against a Namco game that refused to lose steam, one of the all-time greats (also from Namco) that had released just a couple of months prior, and literally Donkey Kong, an arcade game so successful and famous it helped set Nintendo on the trajectory that turned it into the absolute juggernaut it’s been for decades now. Finishing seventh against all of those odds is something, but Midway, Namco’s overseas partner, couldn’t replicate that success in North American arcades, meaning Bosconian didn’t end up with the kind of cultural cache of the rest of these titles, even with shoot ‘em ups being such a huge deal at the time.

Bosconian is a multidirectional shooter from 1981, at a time when multidirectional shooters were still sort of figuring out just what they were capable of. That subgenre of shoot ‘em ups wasn’t new at all: Asteroids, released in 1979 by Atari Inc., was a multidirectional shooter, with your ship able to move forward and also rotate all the way around, allowing it to fire in all directions, and it even included hyperspace travel at the press of a button, which would allow you to teleport out of harm’s way. And possibly into different harm’s way, but that was just the risk you took in a moment of desperation.

Image credit: MobyGames

Even with Asteroids’ success, however, multidirectional shooters were still lagging a bit behind another subgenre of STGs: fixed shooters like Space Invaders and Galaga had become sensations that would be iterated on again and again as studios tried to enhance the magic formula that had brought them about in the first place. Bosconian would help change that and direct more influence elsewhere, not just by building on past shoot ‘em ups to do it, but also another completely unrelated Namco property: 1980’s Rally-X. That game didn’t involve shooting or space at all, but was instead a maze chase game where you controlled a Formula 1 car and attempted to collect yellow flags before your opponents could catch or corner you.

Rally-X used a radar screen that showed the location of each of the stage’s yellow flags (those flags, by the way, are likely known to you whether you’ve ever played Rally-X or not: if you’ve ever fought over an extra life item in a Super Smash Bros. game, then you know what flag this is), and while you couldn’t see the shape of the maze itself on your radar, you did at least get a sense of direction and where you should head. Which let you account for the fact that hey, these cars chasing you are also faster than you are, so you need to be efficient with your pathfinding here.

Bosconian works on a similar premise, except instead of the location of flags, the bits on the radar are enemy space stations that spawn space fighters and shoot missiles at you. To finish a stage of Bosconian, you must destroy every space station: the radar only tells you where they are, just like in Rally-X, and avoiding all of the obstacles between your ship’s location and where the space station sits is on you. There are asteroids, exploding mines, and enemy ships in your path, and you’ll have to fly around or shoot down all of that in order to survive.

Each stage’s map is actually looped, so you can exit on the right and reemerge on the left, or fly to the very top to pop out on the bottom. Utilizing this will help you save some time traveling, and time is vital to you, since the longer it takes you to complete a stage, the more difficult it will be to do so. The map itself was a change for the genre, as it wasn’t a single-screen experience, but significantly larger to the point that kind of movement system was necessary, lest the game have too many dead spots and too much backtracking.

Bosconian is one of the earliest shoot ‘em ups to employ a “rank” system, which isn’t about scoring but is a game figuring out how to adjust the difficulty to account for user behavior. In something like Konami’s Gradius (or its parody series, Parodius), that means powering up the enemies every time you power up your ship, to keep you from just blowing through the game with ease. In Sega’s Fantasy Zone, it means the game ups the difficulty and lowers the reward the longer you stage in a stage: there’s little reason to stick around in a Fantasy Zone level racking up additional points, because the money you’ll get for your kills is lessened, and enemies are going to fire more complicated — and more in general — bullet patterns at you.

Bosconian uses a condition system for its rank, that displays as green (safe), yellow (warning), and red (red is bad). When green, things are quiet. The stage isn’t empty by any means, but your presence either isn’t known or you’ve managed to wipe out anyone resisting it. When yellow, there are a number of ships that are specifically out there to target yours — a squadron of fighters that have been sent to take you down because a space station saw you approaching, a spy ship that’s going to leave the area in a hurry in order to bring in more backup than you might be able to handle, and so on. And when you’re in condition red, which happens when too many space stations are alerted to your presence or the spy ship reaches its destination, the game goes so far as to continue to repeat “Condition red!” again and again at you through a voice sample, and you’ll understand the panic once you look at your surroundings. Ships are now everywhere, and they’re moving much more wildly and aggressively than they were before, which increases the chances you’re simply going to crash into one instead of getting hit by a bullet or missile. It’s not impossible to escape condition red by any means, but you want to avoid being there if you can help it, since your chances of survival are lower while the enemy is on high alert and able to send endless fighters after you.

This condition system helps the levels feel alive, to feel reactive, and it helps keep a sense of urgency to your actions at all time. Which means that you feel the risk inherent in attempting to rack up a higher score in each stage: your goal is to destroy the space stations as efficiently as possible, after which the stage ends and you move on to the next one. You can do this by shooting directly into the middle of a space station when its opened up a missile port to fire at you, and score 1,500 points for your trouble, the most you receive for the destruction of any single foe. Or, you can shoot each of the six orbs that make up the exterior of each space station to destroy it, for 200 points per orb, plus the 1,500 for ultimately destroying it. It’s not quite twice as many points, but it’s close, and adds up in a hurry. Considering an asteroid gets you 10 points, a mine 20, and even a spy ship at most will net you 800 points, being able to score 2,700 points on a space station instead of 1,500 is going to feel worth the risk of flying around the thing repeatedly until you can shoot all six orbs.

One thing that helps in this task is that you fire out of both the front and back of the ship, which allows you to orient yourself in whatever way makes the most sense both offensively and defensively at any time, while still being able to target enemy ships, be they space stations or a fighter that’s on your tail or about to collide with you head on. (In the original arcade version, there was no autofire, but a second version was released that utilized autofire and has been used in subsequent re-releases.) You can move 360 degrees, fire both forward and backward simultaneously — both of which were firsts, according to a 1983 issue of the magazine Electronic Games — and can get the hang of attacking multiple space station orbs at once, attached to separate stations, over time by angling your ship where needed. The maps are quite large, so that’s not always going to be how the space stations are arranged — there will be plenty of dead space on occasion, or long stretches where mines, asteroids, and fighters are your targets as you approach the next station — but when you can double up like that, you’re going to feel both skilled and powerful.

Image credit: Arcade Marquee

There are scoring tricks besides with the space station to keep in mind, like with Galaga making it so that Boss Galaga ships are worth more if they come down from the top of the screen with a standard fighter in formation with them. There are three types of enemy fighters in Bosconian, and each has a leader type unit that’s a different color. If you defeat the leader, the squadron disperses, and you’ll get the minimum points for taking them out. If you pick off each fighter in the squadron first and then shoot down the leader, however, the points are exponentially higher: the I-Type formation is worth 500 points, the P-Type 1,000 points, and the E-Type 1,500, tied with the defeat of a space station for the highest point bonus in the game. If you’re going to get those extends, you’ll need to play for score. It’ll make survival tougher moment to moment, but it’ll also improve your play over time, and make it easier to get the tens of thousands of points needed for an extra ship. You’re not going to get to 70,000 points in a hurry scoring 50 points at a time defeating leaders so their squads take off.

Those aforementioned voice samples are pretty primitive, but they’re both helpful and entertaining. You move into condition yellow, and the game yells, “Alarm! Alarm!” at you, or “Spy ship sighted,” which helps you have another element with which to orient yourself and strategize. The game’s rank system is visually based, between the condition changing through color on screen and the change in what you’re seeing on the playfield, so having a voice telling you that something you can’t see, like the spy ship, is now in play, makes the game world feel, once again, like a living thing you can react to that’s also reacting to you. Wildly impressive for 1981, even if the sound is sometimes a little comical.

Bosconian might not have been a worldwide megahit, but it still had plenty of influence in the industry. Konami’s Time Pilot took a cue from Bosconian, with a ship that can move in multiple directions and fire in them, as well — in Time Pilo, you could fire in 32 directions, because of the arcing movement of your ship — with the goal of each stage being to defeat X number of a specific enemy type in order to advance. Yoshiki Okamoto, the designer of Time Pilot (and eventually games like Street Fighter II), “wanted to make Bosconian more hectic, with more parts where you have to flip around and fire at enemies,” and so he did. You don’t get to the more hectic version of Bosconian without the original, however. Midway might not have scored a hit with the North American version of Bosconian, but they knew there was something here all the same, which is why 1983’s Sinistar is heavily inspired by the Namco shooter they distributed not all that long beforehand. It, too, has voice samples guiding you, a large, scrolling playfield much larger than the visible screen, firing all around the ship, and a need to keep moving so you don’t end up overwhelmed. There are key differences between the two — rather than chasing down space stations, an anthropomorphic demon spaceship is taunting you with vocal samples and hunting you down — but the influence is also as clear as it could be.

Image credit: @CoolBoxArt (Twitter)

Bosconian would receive a pair of dissimilar sequels in 1989’s Blast Off and 1990’s Final Blaster, as well as a 1987 computer port titled Bosconian ‘87. Star Luster, a Famicom space combat simulator released in 1985, takes place in the same world as Bosconian. And while the gameplay is vastly different, the goals are not: you’re traveling around space, attempting to defeat various squadrons and space stations. You’re just doing so from a first-person perspective within a ship’s cockpit, and using hyperspace jumps to make travel faster.

While Bosconian has been released on quite a few Namco Museum collections over the years, including the very first one released for the Playstation in 1995 and 1996, its last release was for the Xbox 360’s Namco Museum Virtual Arcade and the Wii’s Namco Museum Megamix — that’s back in 2008 and 2010, so it’s been awhile. While Bosconian wasn’t part of this gen’s Namco Museum for the Switch (nor the Namco Museum Archives/Namcot Collection released across multiple platforms, since those focus exclusively on Famicom games), it can still come out as an Arcade Archives title, like so many other Namco arcade games have in the past few years. And it should, not just because Hamster should aim to release as many arcade games as possible through their service, but also because Bosconian remains, over 40 years later, an engaging experience that deserved to be a bigger deal than it was.

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