Remembering Toaplan: It's been 30 years since Toaplan shut down
Remembering Toaplan: It's been 30 years since Toaplan shut down
Toaplan, one of the great arcade studios of its era, was highly influential in its 10-year run... and well after its closure, too.
Toaplan rose from the ashes of two other short-lived developers, and made a mark on the arcade scene of the 80s and early 90s. They were influential, they were innovative, they made the games they wanted to make, but they couldn’t survive the changing landscape of arcades, and shut down in March of 1994. Still, their influence continued both because of the games they had made and the games the branches of their family tree would go on to make, and Toaplan is now seeing something of a revival in many ways: all of this will be covered throughout the month of March. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
It’s hard to overstate Toaplan’s influence on the video game industry. They’re as responsible as anyone else for the directions the shoot ‘em up genre would take both in a post-Xevious world as well as in a post-Street Fighter II one nearly a decade later. And shooting games are far from the only thing they focused on, even if it’s the genre they’re most associated with. They may not have had impact on the scale of a Nintendo or Namco or Sega, but their story is still a vital one to video game history, and worth retelling.
Toaplan seemed like they were free to make the games they wanted to make, and so they did, until the market no longer allowed for that. As one of Toaplan’s original developers, Tatsuya Uemura, put it in a 2012 interview with STG Gameside:
Since it was a development company from the start, we were able to make the games we wanted. In that sense it was incredibly fun. Though it might be why we went bankrupt… And as an organization, I don’t think there was anyone who hated coming to work. The relationship between junior and senior employees was also great. There was no one who didn’t want to go on drinking parties or company trips. There was a sense of harmony and it was a really pleasant environment. Its really a shame it had to end. At a typical company your stress just builds and builds (laughs), and you feel like everyone is just looking out for themselves.
Before that bankruptcy, however, Toaplan got 10 years, which is way more than Uemura’s first employer had gotten: when he was hired by Orca as a sound designer, they were “technically” already bankrupt, and then he and other developers moved over to Crux, which was founded by Orca’s Takeshi Tozu, and that studio also went bankrupt practically immediately. When you consider that Toaplan almost at once began working on games that were in the spirit of what Orca and Crux had made, well… 10 years is a long time.
Toaplan’s early games were once shrouded in mystery, mostly because they weren’t allowed to credit themselves in them by the publishers. Jongō, released in 1984, was Toaplan’s first game: it was a Mahjong arcade title made for SNK. Their next release, Performan, was a single-screen action/maze game for Data East, which also hid Toaplan’s name — it was only later revealed to be a Toaplan title when developers who worked on it admitted as much. The first Toaplan title that they were known for, in no small part due to the relationship that spun out of it, was 1985’s Tiger-Heli. This shooter, heavily influenced by Crux’s Gyrodine, was published by Taito: the Toaplan/Taito relationship would result in the latter publishing 14 of the studio’s 31 games, from 1985 through 1993, and then one more post-closure for good measure. Expect to hear more on all of that throughout March.
Let’s focus on Performan now, though. It was just assumed that this was a Data East game, to the point that an issue of Gamest magazine labeled Tiger-Heli as Toaplan’s debut title. And while it, as an action game, doesn’t feel like the Toaplan more people are familiar with, it’s also an excellent introduction to the other, lesser-known side of Toaplan. The one that would make Snow Bros., and Pipi & Bibi’s, Demon’s World, Wardner, and so on. This is the Toaplan that would often take existing ideas and iterate on them with their own changes to the formula, creating something entirely new in the process. Performan has a little bit of Dig Dug II in it, which itself has a little bit of Pac-Man in it, and there are some light Bomberman-esque elements present, as well. Thanks to how it all ties together, and that Performan also includes some short-range shooting, however, it doesn’t actually feel like any of those games in the end. It feels like Performan. It’s very much a Toaplan game, in that sense, even if it was made so early in their existence that it was developed in a cramped apartment room instead of in an office, even if they couldn’t put their name on it.
Performan is a top-down game where you’re trying to eliminate all of the on-screen enemies without dying, while playing as the robot who shares a name with the game. You do this by firing boomerangs at them, or by exploding the bombs that are on-screen — either with a boomerang or by digging under it and causing it to fall down. Your digging allows you to escape the foes who are chasing you, and also move faster than you do, and the enemy drill characters can make their own holes to chase you down there, while the rest can go through any holes that already exist. It’s not particularly complicated when you consider the limited actions you can choose from, but it is difficult, which was kind of Toaplan’s whole vibe. “The foundation of our design was to make a game that wasn’t overly complex, that anyone could clear… I always thought of it as a genre that even a busy salaryman could just pick up and enjoy,” Uemura told STG Gameside in 2012 when discussing the challenges of their shooting games. And while their shooting games did end up getting more intentionally difficult over time as the player abilities increased, there was always space in Toaplan’s profile for a Snow Bros. or a Demon’s World and so on, which remained easy to pick up, but featured some high-level mechanics if you wanted to truly succeed at them or post a high score.
Tiger-Heli ended up being more successful than the Crux game that inspired it, which led to Toaplan making other shooters that found even more success, until that was the thing they were known for. And while there is going to be plenty of coverage of Toaplan’s shoot ‘em ups for the rest of this month — from the innovative military shooter Tiger-Heli to the sci-fi masterpiece Truxton to the dawning of a new era in STG with V-V — there will be just as many looks at everything else they were up to. As well as what its former developers have spent the last 30 years doing, whether it was forming their own studios that produced some of the greatest shoot ‘em ups in history, or forming a new studio named after a famous Toaplan title in order to re-secure all of the rights to the original’s games — a move that’s made Toaplan see something of a revival of their past in the present, as well as the potential for a revival of actual Toaplan series with new entries instead of just re-releases.
Toaplan has been gone for decades now, but between the work they produced over 10 years and the family tree of developers that came out of them, the revival of their old, often arcade-only properties on modern hardware, and the fact that new entries in Toaplan series are now on the way with the blessing and involvement of former Toaplan developers, it certainly doesn’t feel like they’ve been absent. If you weren’t very familiar with their work before — again, much of it was arcade-only, and and some Japan-only, too — hopefully this month of looking back can change that. Especially since you can actually go out and play so many of these titles now, even ones you previously never could, with the rest slated to be on the way at some point, too. It’s never too late for a proper education, and even if you’re already in the know, we can at least reminisce.
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