Remembering Toaplan: Out Zone
A wonderful arcade game that somehow didn't end up with a home conversion for roughly three decades.
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.
Out Zone is a fascinating Toaplan game, as it’s both similar in some respects to the output they had already released — a run and gun is a shoot ‘em up variant, after all, and Toaplan is one of the most influential shoot ‘em up studios in history — but also wildly different. For one, there’s an emphasis on two players: the game hits a lot different with a friend, and in ways that improve the experience, which is not always the case for their more traditional shooters. It’s also much easier than their vertically scrolling shooting games, because there is no forced scrolling in it, which means you have a little bit more control over your own pace and ability to dodge incoming fire.
And Out Zone, for whatever reason, didn’t end up with a home port despite its obvious quality and fun factor. There were a few Toaplan games that never received home ports while the studio was around, but they were usually ones that didn’t succeed in the arcades, were designed specifically for them like their quiz title, or were maybe, in addition to the above, going to be difficult to market in the early 90s without their key selling point of, say, congratulatory nudity. Out Zone, though, is a run and gun, and a real good one at that, built around the idea of multiple people firing off thousands of bullets at robots and enemy soldiers and huge bosses, and one that thrived in arcades, to boot. It debuted at fifth in Game Machine’s table game rankings in the August 15, 1990 issue, stayed in the top 10 through October, then remained in the top 25 until the start of the next year. It’s no Pac-Man or what have you, but that’s still a fine run, and games with much less success than that were ported to consoles and computers all the time.
The best guess going for why it didn’t see a port is that the platforms of the day wouldn’t have been able to handle it at a level that Toaplan would be satisfied with. By 1990, Toaplan was more involved in the ports of their games, sometimes taking it upon themselves to create the conversions for the Mega Drive and Genesis, while contracting out to studios they had prior relationships with (such as ones with former Orca employees) for PC Engine and NES ports. Out Zone was an arcade game running on hardware that seemed to struggle a bit to run it smoothly when things got real busy, and maybe the idea of toning it down a bit for the Genesis just didn’t appeal to Toaplan, in comparison to, instead, focusing their resources and time on brand new projects or ports of games that wouldn’t require that level of effort to produce.
Maybe it was for the best, since, in addition to the hardware capabilities, Out Zone is certainly designed with arcade sticks in mind more than a directional pad: since you can rotate to fire a wide wave of bullets at incoming foes — really, you have to do that if you want to live — the 8-way direction capabilities of an arcade stick are going to be far superior to what a D-pad could offer, even when it’s the one found on the Genesis pad. Run and guns ported from arcades to homes in the days before Out Zone had to reckon with these issues, too, but something about Out Zone’s design just emphasizes that need even further.
So, in addition to trying to get the game’s performance right, it might have needed an entire new re-balancing for home conversions as well, to compensate for the different way inputs would work: the game would just be frustrating to play if the controller couldn’t keep up with what was needed of you. Not an impossible task to make these changes, but again, Toaplan wasn’t Taito, able to spend their time working on a million projects at once. Toaplan was a small studio working on a few games at a time, contracting out ports when it made sense and saving the Genesis ones for themselves, due to architectural similarities to their arcade boards, when that was the better play. Maybe Out Zone was just going to be a little too much work to convert with that in mind.
Throw in that there are multiple versions of Out Zone out there already — three different ones are included in the Bitwave Games conversion released on Windows in 2023, and I’ve seen as many as five versions mentioned in other coverage of the game — and maybe Toaplan was just already at capacity here for a game that did well, but wasn’t a huge hit like their more standard shoot ‘em ups. Unlike with Taito when they’d distribute a Toaplan game, the publisher didn’t take it upon themselves to start converting it, either: Tecmo, Out Zone’s publisher in Japan, settled for just doing so in arcades.
It would take nearly three decades for Out Zone to leave arcades for the home. First, M2 announced that it, along with basically the rest of Toaplan’s library, would be part of their M2 ShotTriggers line, under the Toaplan Arcade Garage banner. (Chances are good that it ends up paired with FixEight when that occurs, given it’s a spiritual successor and Toaplan’s other run and gun: M2 has been pairing like games together to this point, such as the two Tiger-Heli games Toaplan produced, both Shark titles, and their two horizontal shooters.) Then, it was included in a bartop arcade console, the iiRcade. In 2022, it was part of Sega’s Astro City Mini V, which is a mini arcade cabinet set in TATE mode (that also, unfortunately, has real input lag issues with some titles, though, Out Zone is maybe not impacted by that so much.)
The first of those is a conversion that hasn’t released yet, however, while the other two are specialty machines, and expensive ones, too. Luckily, Bitwave Games converted Out Zone for Windows in 2023, and it’s priced at just $8: it includes three versions of the game, allows for 1-2 players, and includes a variety of online leaderboards as well as assist options like rewind, difficulty changes, and the usual stuff that you’re used to seeing in re-releases of retro arcade titles these days. It’s not the first home release officially speaking, but it’s the first for the vast majority of people who aren’t super enthusiasts picking up every piece of hardware that releases. People can play Out Zone now, and buddy, they should want to.
You play as a cyborg who is serving as the last line of defense/offense for a people under siege. Pretty typical stuff for an arcade shooter and all that, but you’re not here for the story. You’re here for shooting a lot of space bullets at space marines and screen-filling tank-like things determined to blow you up before you can do the same to them. And you will not be disappointed, either at the number of rounds you’ll have to fire or the explosions you’ll cause.
There are two firing methods in Out Zone, plus a screen-clearing bomb, of which you’ll find plenty of stock of throughout. The first way to fire is a standard, upgradeable weapon that fires in eight directions: this is where that rotational arcade stick really came into play, because you could swing that thing around and leave an entire trail of bullets across a wide part of the screen, no small thing for a game loaded with popcorn enemies who are firing just as much at you as you are at them. The second method changes things completely: you pick up a C icon, and it switches to your shoulder-mounted cannons. In this setup, you face forward, always: no more turning to the side, or behind you, or rotating. But you fire a wide and powerful shot, albeit one without autofire capabilities, so you have to hammer that button yourself. It can be annoying to use in the wrong places, but it has its moments where it’s the only answer. As it’s powerful and bosses are always directly in front of you, it’s great there, and it can also be great during the sections of the game where you need to be very careful about where you walk so as not to fall through holes in the floor. This way you can always face forward and not worry about doubling up on both aiming and which direction you’re walking in with the stick.
It’s an idea borrowed to a degree from the likes of Slap Fight or Truxton, with certain weapons making more sense at certain times, instead of you necessarily sticking with just your favorite or the “best” one throughout. And luckily you can switch back and forth with more ease than in either of those games or any of Toaplan’s others, as well: those C icons are everywhere, sometimes more often than you might want them, but it just means the freedom to go between your handheld blaster and your shoulder-mounted one you can exercise practically as often as you’d like.
You don’t have a health bar in Out Zone, but instead die (and leave behind a wicked, enemy-killing explosion — useful for co-op) — whenever you’re struck by anything. Many enemies are just as fragile as you are, so avoiding this quick death is all about moving to the right places at the right times, while picking off as many enemies as possible as fast as possible. You do have a bar worth worrying about, even if it’s not health, and that’s energy: you’re a cyborg, and you run on something besides just calories. You’ll find E icons in containers scattered across levels, and so long as you keep on moving forward without overly long pauses, you’ll be able to reach each one no problem and refill your energy meter. If you take too long hiding behind cover, however, or spend your time retreating again and again from a boss or difficult mid-level encounter, you’ll run out of energy and die before you can see it through. It’s not pushing you ahead as quickly as, for instance, the pumpkin head that spews unkillable ghosts at you in Snow Bros., but it does force you to keep at a respectable pace even as you consider the dangers of running right into one mess of foes or another.
You’ll fight through seven levels that are designed around the idea of not just lots of enemies, but obstructions to walk around, pathways to choose, holes in floors to avoid, floors that will break if you step on them, weapon caches you’ll miss out on if you move the screen ahead too far — there’s no forced scrolling, but there’s also no backtracking — and also big bosses with a whole bunch of weapons to fire at you, and sometimes limited windows and weak points to fire upon yourself. There are loads of bombs to pick up, and using them will help you along the way, but would-be scoring experts should know that hefty bonuses are handed out for not utilizing bombs. Of course, that’s all well and good in theory, but sometimes the screen will introduce a conveyor belt of enemies on the side that fire off more rounds than you might be able to dodge before dying, and, well, just one bomb won’t be missed, right? Maybe even two!
The basic versions of weapons do a lot of heavy lifting in the game, but there are some specialty pickups, as well. The Super Burner is a short-range flamethrower that makes up for its continuous shot that doesn’t travel all the way across the screen by incinerating anything it touches faster than your standard weapons would. Rotating with that and making your own little fire wheel can be pretty wonderful. The best one, however, is the Super Ball, which is basically a giant death yo-yo that spins around your character and wipes out anything it touches. It has an even shorter range than the Super Burner, sure, but it also takes out tanks and stationary cannons basically instantaneously. It’s hard not to love it, even with its obvious drawback of giving enemies out of its range more time to fire on you.
In addition to those weapons, there’s a shield that absorbs one hit, and a pickup that increases your running speed — essential for some of the busier, bullet-filled sections, especially if you’re playing solo and have to get to everything trying to kill you yourself. And you’ll be very thankful for it against certain bosses, which have you either dodging shots that come right up on you before you can know where to move, or because they have robotic appendages they send out to try to hit you.
Those bosses, by the way, are varied, and experiment a bit more than some of Toaplan’s forced vertical scrolling STG. Maybe it’s because the screen isn’t scrolling here during the battles, and additional enemies aren’t being introduced, so the bosses themselves have to do all of the heavy lifting. They’re standouts basically from top to bottom, though, and while playing solo you can see exactly why this was really designed as a two-player experience: the windows to damage some of them are so short, and they oftentimes have secondary weapons that you should destroy first to improve your quality of life. Another blaster would do that with ease, while also giving bosses somewhere else to aim.
Out Zone isn’t particularly long, and it’s far from the most challenging game Toaplan released. Still, “easy” for Toaplan is someone else’s hard, and it’ll take time for you to figure out the secrets and methods for Out Zone that will result in a one-credit clear or truly high-ranking score. It’s all time well-spent, though, whether playing solo or with a friend: the latter is the superior way to play, however, and now you actually can do so without MAME or some extraordinary luck in an arcade.
Thank you to @cosmoschtroumpf for compiling Game Machine data used in this feature.
This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.