Remembering Toaplan: Snow Bros.
Remembering Toaplan: Snow Bros.
Toaplan's non-shoot 'em ups rarely succeeded commercially, but Snow Bros. at least managed to become a bit of a cult classic, spawning a sequel and a modern revival, 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.
Toaplan was primarily known for their shoot ‘em ups, which makes sense, given their work in that arena helped shape both the era they developed in as well as the long-term future of the genre. They’d regularly venture out into other kinds of games, though, and while few of them found any success whatsoever — there’s a reason Toaplan kept going back to shooting games outside of just the fact their developers really liked both making and playing them — there’s one that stands out from the crowd. That would be Snow Bros., which did well enough in arcades to generate a sequel, and was also ported to a number of home platforms over the course of a few years. That was standard procedure for some of the company’s STG, sure, but sequels for non-shoot ‘em ups were something Toaplan just never did outside of Snow Bros. 2. There was a planned sequel to the falling blocks puzzle game Teki Paki, but even that had more to do with its popularity among Toaplan staff, and certainly not its popularity in arcades — that canceled project is the closest the studio ever got to a second sequel for a non-STG.
Snow Bros. is a single-screen platformer where the goal is to clear out all of the enemies in order to advance to the next level. This part of things wasn’t new at all: it was the style of the day in the 80s even before Bubble Bobble came in and blew everyone away with its layers and layers of complexity and difficulty hidden beneath a cute exterior. Snow Bros. came to the party pretty late, really, since four years had passed since Bubble Bobble, and single-screen platformers of this kind had already often made the switch to more powerful hardware and multi-screen platformers that still kept the “defeat all the enemies to advance” setup going: think Bubble Bobble’s first sequel-turned-spin-off, Rainbow Islands, or another Taito joint, 1990’s Liquid Kids. Some developers stuck with the classic single-screen thing going a bit longer, however, such as Jaleco with Rod Land, Data East’s Tumblepop, and Toaplan with Snow Bros.
While you might see Snow Bros. compared to Bubble Bobble and its ilk, the comparison really only holds for their single-screen nature and the idea of clearing all the enemies on screen to advance. Everything else is wildly different: Bubble Bobble is a lot slower-paced with more emphasis on items and puzzles, whereas Snow Bros. is basically pure chaos in stages where the goal is to win as fast as possible before the game attempts to kill you. Bubble Bobble has layers of complexity and depth and requires a second player in order to get the real ending, and the whole thing is designed around this idea. Snow Bros. is fun with a second player because it just means more chaos — as with the vast majority of Toaplan’s games, the core was designed around just one person showing up with a bunch of quarters and trying to have some fun.
Snow Bros. is both an easy and a difficult game. It’s easy to get into, as you don’t have much to learn in terms of what you can do to succeed: you are a snowman, and you throw snowballs at enemies. When you throw enough snowballs at a foe, they become a big snowball, and you can then roll the ball around, jump on top of it, or push it off a ledge and send it flying at other monsters like the wintry ball of death that it is. You can ride said deathball around the stage and hop off whenever you want to, briefly gaining invulnerability while dismounting and for a very short time after, and then set about collecting items defeated enemies caught in a combo dropped, or start making a new giant snowball out of another monster.
You will die often, because touching or being touched by any enemy who isn’t either stunned by snow or completely a big snowball will instantly kill you. But the game isn’t super difficult, all things considered: it lacks the immense rising challenge of Bubble Bobble or all the kind of hidden secrets that populate that game and plenty of others in the arcade platformer genre. There are secrets in Snow Bros., sure, but it’s mostly just for unlocking some extra lives, or pulling off a screen-clearing combo that eliminates every enemy in the stage all at once, triggering the release of a bunch of collectible point bonuses. Other than that, you can complete Snow Bros. without being great at it, so long as you’ve got the quarters to keep you going. Additional credits is your only real impediment, as there are no major skill check moments like there are in Toaplan’s STG, no big set piece that keeps you from brute-forcing your way through with coins.
In this way, it’s one of the most successful versions of Toaplan’s dream of making a game that anyone can play and enjoy, regardless of their starting skill level. But it also is lacking a bit in challenge compared to their other titles, if you don’t care about trying to post the highest score possible. If you do, though — you are a person who goes into an arcade and plays arcade games, in this hypothetical, so, yes — then Snow Bros.’ challenge resides in staying alive long enough to earn more lives in order to keep that score climbing for as long as possible. And that part isn’t simple, given how full the screen eventually gets with enemies trying to kill you from multiple directions, with projectiles or sliding down ramps right into you or, if you take too long in any stage — which is an amount of time that’s shorter than you think it is — in the form of unkillable ghosts launched by an angered, living pumpkin.
You are going to be always moving in Snow Bros. to avoid this fate, and to try to get a snowball going from up high in many levels before enemies disperse, making getting a bunch of them in one shot tougher to pull off. As said, if you defeat every monster on screen in one roll, you’ll get a flurry of 10,000-point bonuses dropping from the top of the level: you probably won’t be able to collect all of them before they vanish in a hurry, but considering normal bonuses are for point totals in the hundreds or worth 1,000, even a few 10,000-point pickups is huge. You get multiplier points and item drops for defeating more than a single monster with a snowball: if you just defeat the one captured in the snowball and no other enemies before it crashes into a wall and explodes, you won’t receive any kind of items. So not only will you score fewer points just throwing every enemy at walls one at a time this way, you also won’t be able to improve your performance going forward.
Items include some bonus point pickups that always take the form of food — usually some form of sushi — but there are also performance-enhancing potions of various colors. Red potions make you run faster, which is great, because at first your snowman runs about as fast as an actual snowman would. Yellow potions give your snowball throws extra range, which lets you hit enemies from further away — essential when trying to take out any foe that has its own projectiles you don’t want to get too close to. Blue lets you fire off more snow per throw, shortening the amount of time it takes to completely cover an enemy with it. And green potions are a special one that enhance your size and let you fly through the level, instantly killing any enemy you touch. That’s a rarer one than the others, but makes an impact whenever you do get it.
Dying will cause your power levels and speed to reset to their default state, which, unlike Toaplan’s shooters, shouldn’t cause frustrations or a need to build back up via decoding whatever puzzle Tatsuya Uemura or Masahiro Yuge left behind for you to solve in order to make it through while underpowered. You’re just going to move a little more slowly until you find an upgrade again, and yes, you’re more susceptible to death in this state, especially later on when there are more enemies and projectiles to consider, but it never feels truly overwhelming. Especially since, late in the game when there are tons of enemies on screen, there are also holes in the floor that you can escape through to fall back into the stage by way of the ceiling.
There are hidden Snow Bros. emblems to collect in the game, and when you find one and make it appear, four blue characters who are entirely made of face will drop from the ceiling. Each defeated and collected face — plowing over them with a snowball alone isn’t enough — will grant you a letter. If you spell “snow” with those letters, you gain an extra life. It takes less time than spelling out “extra” like in so many other games, but since you have to be very particular about how you go about defeating them, that might also just be an in theory thing.
The original version of Snow Bros. features 50 levels, with a boss battle centered around making snowballs out of regular enemies to then launch at the big guy (or big guys, on occasion) every 10th of those. Not much was made of the story in the original. You were a snowman or snowmen, and you threw snowballs. Fire melted you, because again, snow-based person. There were multiple ports that added all kinds of canon changes to the tale, though, or at least introductory and end-game cutscenes that fleshed out a little more about how these snowmen were actually regular old princes until they were cursed by an evil king who they then set off to defeat to get their old identities (and princess girlfriends) back from.
The NES and Famicom port was handled by Soft House, according to Uemura, and the reason they were trusted with that port is because the “top software engineer from Orca was running Soft House.” Orca was one of the companies that folded and made way for the formation of Toaplan back in the mid-80s, so there was a connection there. Toaplan had contracted Soft House to make the port since the one system Toaplan bothered to port their games to was the Sega Genesis, given its hardware similarities to their arcade work. The NES version of Snow Bros. (named Snow Brothers in North America) is a collector’s item: a loose cartridge currently goes for just under $300, per PriceCharting, while a complete copy last sold for $800. The manual alone last went for $242. Snow Brothers did not sell many copies in North America, despite being a real solid port of a real solid game. That’ll happen with games that become cult classics, they weren’t big and popular in the moment and all by definition.
Toaplan themselves would create the Mega Drive port for a Japan-only release, with Tengen as publisher, and it included 20 additional levels and the ability to play as the rescued princesses after the initial 50 — now it was their turn to save the titular bros. There was also a Game Boy port, once again handled by Not Toaplan, which cut out the co-op gameplay for a single-player experience, and reworked the story so that one Snow Bro was saving the other Snow Bro instead of princess girlfriends. There are 10 additional levels in this one, too.
The Mega Drive version might be the definitive version of the game, if only because of those 20 additional levels: the game has only seen a re-release in modern days for the Sega Genesis Mini, but M2 will eventually include all of the console ports in a Toaplan Arcade Garage release, at least — yes, the wildly expensive Snow Brothers one, too. A modern remake, Snow Bros. Nick & Tom Special, came out for the Nintendo Switch in 2022, and it’s a perfect recreation of the arcade experience through the first 50 levels… and then kind of a disappointing mess in its unique add-on stages. Those stages don’t fit in, aesthetically or in level design, with the original ones that you played in order to unlock these. The bosses are frustrating and and lengthy bouts instead of tests of your reflexes and thinking, enemies are mostly there in huge numbers as a challenge instead of strategically placed to force a quick solution from you — they’re just very obviously not as well put together as what came 30 years prior, which is a real shame since the core product is so enjoyable, especially with a friend. Hey, at least you’re not forced to stick with “enhanced” smoothed over sprites in this release, that’s not nothing.
Snow Bros. has quite the legacy for a game that really did just alright in arcades. After an April release, it landed in Game Machine’s rankings for arcade revenue, in 11th among table machines, in their June 15 issue. It peaked at number 10 for the July 1 report, then 13th and 18th before falling out of the rankings as summer concluded. It had a bounce back into the top 25 in November before disappearing entirely from the rankings — not a bad year at the arcades by any means, but not in line with Toaplan’s shoot ‘em ups. Still, enough to warrant Toaplan bothering to make their own port for the Mega Drive while contracting out for multiple other ports on the Game Boy, NES, and Amiga, and Capcom bothered to pick up publishing duties in North America for the first two of those. There was something here, and it resulted in a bizarre and chaotic four-player sequel in 1994 — Snow Bros. 2: With New Elves — which also ended up being Toaplan’s final game, as it released during their bankruptcy proceedings.
The series lives on, however, and not just because of the 2022 re-release and the coming re-release of its sequel, but also because Tatsujin, a Toaplan successor studio with rights to their work, is working on Snow Bros. Wonderland for Playstation 4 and 5, as well as the Switch, with the expectation being that it’ll release in 2024, 30 years after Toaplan’s shutdown and the last new Snow Bros. game. With any luck, it’ll understand what made Snow Bros. and its sequel sing more than the added content of the modern release did, because there’s always room for more, good Snow Bros. out there.
Thank you to @cosmoschtroumpf for compiling Game Machine data used in this feature.
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