Remembering Toaplan: Teki Paki
Toaplan's action games often had puzzle elements to them, so of course they eventually made an actual puzzle title.
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 wasn’t known for puzzle games, but they were certainly known for designing their more action-oriented titles — especially their shoot ‘em ups — with puzzles in mind. Part of why Toaplan was so loathe to make the switch to removing checkpoints from their games in favor of reviving right where you failed is because the checkpoints were very intentional: it was about learning patterns and figuring out how to build yourself back up, how to escape the situation you’d put yourself in. So it makes sense that they’d eventually create a true puzzle title, and that it would, being a Toaplan game, be designed to return the favor and have “the intensity of shooting games.” What makes less sense is that no one seemed to care about it, because the result of these decisions, Teki Paki, was great.
Falling block puzzle games were officially a thing by the time Teki Paki released, which is why Toaplan went in this direction. Tetris was, of course, the king there, but Sega had attempted to counter Nintendo’s Tetris relationship with Columns and Columns II in 1990. Data East would eventually get around to the genre with their Magical Drop games, Jaleco entered the fray with Soldam, and, in 1991, Compile spun off characters from a series of dungeon crawlers into a franchise far more successful than that one ever was: Puyo Puyo. They were all called “Tetris clones” due to a lack of language to explain what was going on here, even though they were all wildly different from Tetris. They all had blocks to clear, however, so the tag stuck.
Teki Paki was as unique as any of the above. You didn’t clear lines, really, but could instead clear any grouping of five of the same color block. That could mean five directly in a row. It could mean two directly next to each other with another two diagonal, and a fifth diagonal that was set in a different direction — so long as they were touching in an adjacent fashion, and not separated by an entire block, then you could consider them a group. L-shaped three-block pieces fell from the top of the playing area, and you could rotate them while allowing a “loose” end to fall down beneath the “stable” top pairing, giving you some options for slotting blocks down instead of blocking off entire columns. What all of this freedom meant, though, was that to actually score a ton of points, you needed to purposefully not clear every group at every opportunity. Like with Puyo Puyo — not in gameplay, but in mindset — you had to think of the long run here. Anyone can clear a group of five and keep going for a bit, but to rack up a truly impressive score, to unlock the fully realized version of the game, you’re going to need to build yourself an enormous, nerves-inducing structure that’ll collapse into a series of combos with the right clear.
Teki Paki — also known as Brainwashing Game Teki Paki — is all about timing. You want to spend your time building these structures of groupings of not-quite five blocks, clearing what’s needed to avoid losing, and then hope that, before things get completely out of hand, you end up with a series of helpful “Smily” blocks, which have faces on them and flash, and also serve as a wild card. A Smily placed with any group of four of the same color will act as a fifth, and they usually come in groups of two or three or more, depending on how far into the game you are. Think of it like this: in Tetris, you build with the idea of being able to eventually slot in one of those long, straight tetrominos to clear four lines at once and score a Tetris. In Teki Paki, you want to be able to have some places where you can, similarly, slide in a Smily and have it clear away blocks, and then cause a chain reaction that clears far more blocks. Multiple clears in a row from one block placement will give you combo points, and if you also manage to put more than one Smily into a clear, you’ll get a ton of bonus points, as well. Observe:
There were few places left to place blocks in that play area, but the Smily helped clear some room, and then a second Smily even more room, and the clear with a pair was good for 30,000 points all on its own: considering the two-clear combo within was worth 5,000 points, that’s quite the accomplishment. The number keeps going up the more Smily’s there are, too: get a third in there, and it’s 50,000 points. The greatest bonus you can pull off in the game can involve pairing the two special kinds of blocks together. In that video, you can see the blocks that look like time bombs mixed in with the rest. Matching up five time bombs grants you 100,000 points, and, just like the colored blocks, you can also use a Smily as a replacement for a fifth (or more), and still pull off the bonus. It should not be a surprise, but my current highest score on the online leaderboards for Teki Paki is from a round where I managed to secure the five-bomb clear.
The game ends when there’s nowhere left to put a single block. If there isn’t space for all three blocks in a piece, the game simply obliterates the other one or two, and lets you keep going if there’s room for one. Which means you’ll be making decisions at the very top in the hopes of keeping yourself alive with clears or chains of clears from that one block you do add to the mix. You can’t decide where exactly a piece is going to fall from, either: the robot arms at the top drop the piece where they want to, and you adjust its movements from there. Which is normally not an issue, but can be a problem late when there are few spots to even put blocks, or if you build up some taller piles of blocks that end up blocking you from moving over a piece fast enough. These are all things to take into consideration, which will feel a lot more normal once you’re prepared for them.
As mentioned, the game changes a bit the deeper you get into it. As you clear more lines, the game speeds up, but the kinds of blocks you see also change. After 70 cleared lines, Silver pieces are introduced to a group that already included green, orange, yellow, blue, red, and “purple” though it’s more like magenta. Clear a group of five silvers, and get 5,000 points for it, which is to say, the kind of score you’d get for pulling off a combo with regular blocks. After 100 cleared lines, Gold pieces come into play: those are worth 10,000 for a basic clear. And at this point, you’re not seeing a couple of Smily blocks in a row, either, but three or four or more clustered together to help you achieve some ridiculous scores. You have to live long enough to get to that point, though, and again, the game keeps speeding up as you go, too.
Teki Paki does slow back down — the speed increases are not fully permanent — but it’s faster at its base later than it was earlier, with some absurd spikes in pacing that you have to survive by clearing some more lines. It’s not just thinking a few moves ahead at all times, but thinking fast while you do it. One nifty thing about it is that, as an arcade game, your score will be reset when you fail, but you can continue from where you were. So if you want to get to where the “real” game is, you can just keep plugging away, and then really try for those high scores once you’ve got the silver and gold blocks in the mix to help you get there. That won’t work for online leaderboards in the modern console conversion of the game, no, but for your own edification, at least, it’s something.
It’s a bit surprising that Teki Paki didn’t succeed, given its quality and the worldwide sensation that falling block puzzlers had become: it was a failure, and in fact never once charting in something like Game Machine’s twice-monthly revenue rankings. That didn’t stop Toaplan from understanding what they had, however. According to Tetsuya Uemura, Teki Paki was the game that someone from Toaplan’s main office was always playing in the built-in showroom, and there were plans to port it to the Mega Drive/Genesis despite its failure in arcades. That project was far enough along to merit a preview with screenshots in a 1992 issue of Beep! MegaDrive, even, but it never came to pass.
There were also plans for a sequel to Teki Paki, though, that project never got to the point of having screenshots or a preview like the aborted port. It was a “working” game at the point of Toaplan’s closure according to Junya Inoue, who had worked on Toaplan titles like Dogyuun and Batsugun as an artist before moving to Toaplan offshoot studios such as Gazella (Air Gallet) and Cave (ESP Ra.De, Guwange, Progear) in a variety of roles. Understandably, those same Toaplan offshoots focused more on completing the unfinished shoot ‘em ups like Twin Cobra II and the special arrangement of Batsugun instead of the sequel to a failed puzzle game whose port also fell through. A shame all the same, but understandable.
Why did Teki Paki falter in arcades? It’s hard to know the true reason, given its quality and Toaplan’s general reputation combined with the love of falling block puzzlers of the moment. Rarely did their non-shooting games truly take off, though, so their rep might have only gone so far even when the game in question was great. And the fact that Teki Paki was two players but not actually competitive might have hurt, as well. Columns II, which released in 1990, had a dedicated Vs. mode designed around that idea. Teki Paki’s two-player mode was more like… well, two people could play on the same machine at the same time, but it wasn’t against each other, unless they informally just wanted to see how many points they could score and then compare themselves. No best of three or five or whatever, no game ending and a winner declared. Just going as long as you want, until you stop adding credits and hitting start again. Compared to puzzle games with story modes and designed around the idea of competition against someone besides your self or the machine itself, Teki Paki was a bit lacking.
Maybe these issues would have been addressed in a sequel or in the port — Columns for the Sega Genesis, for instance, was a more fleshed out game than its arcade counterpart, and some of those ideas made their way into the sequel. That’s all speculation, however, but it does fit with the idea that Toaplan knew there was a winner here, one that deserved more support in order to prove as much. The studio closed before they got the chance to prove it.
Luckily, Teki Paki is around in the present, over 30 years after it debuted and quietly disappeared from sight. M2’s Toaplan Arcade Garage series includes Teki Paki as a free digital download with any purchase of one of those games, be it digital or physical. That means it’s not included on any of the existing or coming physical copies themselves, but unlike with the bonus DLC/physical edition arcade game releases (Guardian, Pyros, Horror Story), Teki Paki does have online leaderboards. Which means it now also has something for you to compete against if you play, besides yourself and the few top rankings included on the machine that day.
This edition includes the usual M2 “Gadget” modifications used for their ShotTriggers releases, that here let you see the kind of progress you’re making toward the silver and gold thresholds, and how many lines or blocks you’ve cleared. It’s not quite as elaborate as it is for shooting games in the series, but it’s something. You can also change the design of the blocks themselves, or enable hints that show you where you should be placing the blocks sometimes — at the least, that’s useful for new players.
It was also released in 2021 as part of the Evercade’s Toaplan collection, in Volume 1. Bitwave Games probably won’t get to it since their emphasis on Windows ports for Toaplan titles has been entirely shooter-focused, but who knows? Maybe they’ll come back for the rest eventually given the M2 releases have been Japanese exclusives — importable and region-free, yes, but officially Japan-exclusive all the same. Maybe — maybe — Tatsujin will get around to releasing a completed version of the sequel at some point, in the same way they’re releasing another Truxton and Snow Bros. title in 2024. Teki Paki doesn’t have their popularity, no, but between making sure it’s very easily available to anyone who wants to play a Toaplan re-release by way of M2, and its inclusion on Evercade when more popular games hadn’t been released yet… you can connect the dots, at least. It’d be nice, because conceptually, Teki Paki is excellent, and the initial release has a lot going for it. But it could use that Columns II-esque glow up to truly make it stand out, and, now decades later, maybe even thrive.
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