Remembering Toaplan: The enduring relationship with Taito
Remembering Toaplan: The enduring relationship with Taito
Toaplan and Taito worked together throughout Toaplan's existence, as well as shortly after its demise, and now, decades later, 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 impossible to separate Toaplan from Taito, in no small part because, for some time, plenty of people weren’t even aware of the former’s work (and in some cases, might still not be). Maybe they played Tiger-Heli, or Slap Fight, maybe Flying Shark, Twin Cobra, or Truxton, and just assumed that Taito had developed them in-house, like so many other popular arcade games of the mid-to-late-80s. Taito after all, was the studio responsible for Space Invaders, for Bubble Bobble, Elevator Action, Arkanoid, the Darius games, and far more than that, with plenty of shooting games on their résumé besides, as well. Why couldn’t they also be responsible for creating the Tiger and Shark games, with that pedigree?
This wasn’t the case, though: a not insignificant portion of classic Taito shoot ‘em ups, as well as other Taito arcade games in select other genres, were actually made by Toaplan. And without Taito’s input, even: this was a partnership, but more in a developer/distributor way, not in the more common developer/publisher format, where the latter funds the creation of the former’s game, or contracts the studio to make it for them. And the relationship began even before Toaplan formed, as Taito published Crux’s helicopter shoot ‘em up, Gyrodine, in 1984, which in turn led to Tiger-Heli becoming a Taito-distributed title.
Toaplan made the games they wanted to make on their own dime, and then would show up to Taito’s offices with them — or the other way around, just to see what Toaplan had going on — and check in on if they were interested in distributing the game for them. Far more often than not in those early days, Taito said yes: of the 17 video games that Toaplan developed in the 1980s, Taito published 11 of them, including a stretch of eight in a row that began with Flying Shark and ended with Demon’s World. It would have been 10 in a row, too, if Toaplan hadn’t interrupted 1986’s budding streak began by Get Star/Guardian with the self-published eroge, Mahjong Sisters.
It took until 1989’s Hellfire for Toaplan to finally have their name put on a game of theirs that Taito had published. Which is kind of darkly funny, in retrospect, since Toaplan’s horizontal shooters aren’t as good as their vertical ones, to the point that they moved on from the genre in a hurry after two attempts, one of which wasn’t even initially supposed to receive a release, but was instead a training development project. (And no, that’s not why Zero Wing’s localization is… like that. That was a completely separate problem that exists in exactly one regional port of the game.)
Anyway, that’s not some personal shade being thrown at Hellfire and Zero Wing by me: that’s what Tatsuya Uemura, one of the key Toaplan developers, thinks about them himself:
We had been told to make a game like the popular Gradius series. Though I hate horis. (laughs) Zero Wing was based on the Hellfire engine and was made by new recruits as part of their training, but we stopped doing horis after that. I think we realized we just didn’t know how to make a horizontal shooter interesting. Later we were told by many users that they really liked Zero Wing, but to be honest, I don’t know what they liked about it.
Hellfire and Zero Wing both have better reputations and higher quality than Uemura wants to admit, at least, but still: they’re good shooters with some intriguing mechanics that pale in comparison to much of the company’s vertical shooter output. So Hellfire being the first Toaplan game to be recognized as such, based on their reputation with better games, is worth cracking a wry smile over. The universe has a sense of humor and all that.
Taito, at the same time they allowed Hellfire to feature Toaplan’s name and logo on the title screen, also retroactively allowed the studio to point out that they had made the games that they made. So Toaplan’s name still wouldn’t be on active cabinets of Flying Shark or what have you, but at least they could use their development of that game and the rest of the bunch to promote upcoming games, and show they had been doing masterful work for some time to a general public that might not have been aware of that.
As said, this wasn’t a publisher-style relationship. Taito, with one notable exception, didn’t give any input into the games Toaplan was making, and even that one exception — the vertical STG, Daisenpu, known abroad as Twin Hawk — was just to tell Toaplan which arcade board Taito would like the game to be developed on. Otherwise, the requests were about incorporating simultaneous two-player mode into some of their titles, but not to rebuild the games from the ground up for that or anything: the original intent and balance remained centered around the single-player experience that Toaplan had envisioned. Please enjoy Uemura’s description of why the overseas games had to be a little different:
[Taito were] the ones that requested 2-player simultaneous play. Originally in the overseas versions you didn't return to a checkpoint when you died, and simultaneous play was a must. The players at that time in America were always playing in a somewhat drunken fashion, not making strategies or plans.
For someone designing their shooters around the idea of puzzles to be unlocked and repeatable paths and strategies to figure out, it’s little wonder that Uemura wasn’t a fan of the overseas versions of his games, but like with the ports, it also felt like it was something Toaplan didn’t consider to be any of their business. They knew which version of the game was their version, and were proud of that one, so they’d incorporate what was needed for an overseas release or let someone go wild adding new levels or mechanics in a port, and move on.
Taito, per Uemura, did have the copyright to the specific games they distributed for Toaplan, and could continue to release them on other platforms or have them ported for various consoles, but they didn’t own the trademarks: Taito could not, for instance, decide to keep making sequels to Tiger-Heli and Twin Cobra after Toaplan dissolved. Not unless they had the express consent of ex-Toaplan members who were working on Twin Cobra II at the time of Toaplan’s closure, anyway — which is exactly what happened. Twin Cobra II, or Kyukyoku Tiger II in Japan, was finished by Takumi, a studio formed from ex-Toaplan developers, on a Taito board and published by Taito. A little bit of post-Toaplan Toaplan, by way of their closest partner in video games.
Oddly, who owned the trademarks was really an up in the air question for some time, likely complicated in part by Taito’s partnership with them that resulted in the arcade giant possessing the copyrights. Toaplan themselves didn’t trademark a single game during their 10-year run, and no other company, thankfully, rose up with any strange challenge to try to legally take claim of Toaplan’s work. Takumi put in a trademark on Kyukyoku Tiger after creating its sequel, and, according to Uemura, might have also acquired the Truxton trademark, while Raizing/Eighting picked up some trademarks, as well. While this all could have ended in some kind of disaster where Toaplan classics were scooped up by one studio or rightsholder after another, somehow, the rights are now all in one place: Tatsujin was formed by ex-Toaplan developer Masahiro Yuge in 2017, and they acquired the rights to the entire library, including unfinished and unpublished works found on their licensing information page. This is why the Toaplan renaissance is happening across consoles and computers and mobile devices now, by the way: because it finally can.
Taito would publish additional Toaplan titles in the future, as well, although they were less involved with the company’s 1990s output than they had been in the 80s, mostly due to the fact that Toaplan had enough name recognition at this point, and the resources, to distribute their own games. Taito ended up distributing a couple of games that Toaplan’s reputation as an action-oriented, shooting game studio wouldn’t have sold on their own: Ghox, a brick-breaking paddle game, and Enma Daiō, a quiz/lie detector title that turned out to be Toaplan’s most expensive project. As Uemura once said in an interview with Gamen Gai, “If you put the Toaplan name on a shooting game it would sell, but we also put out weird stuff like Knuckle Bash and Enma Daiou… Enma Daiou actually cost a lot of money. All of those non-shooting titles failed.” So it’s no wonder that Toaplan would ask for Taito’s name to be on something off-brand like Enma Daiō just as a potential little name recognition boost to its bottom line.
When Toaplan did close in 1994, that mostly ended the relationship with Taito as far as releasing new games went. There was the Takumi-developed exception of Twin Cobra II, as well as a Toaplan-style shoot ‘em up developed in-house by Taito staff, which at this point included ex-Toaplan employees. Gekirindan, released in 1995, was produced by Osamu Ōta, a former Toaplan devloper and the composer of Twin Hawk, Snow Bros., and Rally Bike, that was a bit of a throwback to Toaplan’s mid-life shooters like Truxton II. It had elements of newer shooters in it, like the ability to choose between quite a few ships instead of just the one standard, and it took advantage of its 32-bit arcade hardware like Toaplan’s late-life shooters such as Batsugun did, but overall it felt less like one of its in-house Taito shooter peers and more like a Toaplan game that Taito had agreed to distribute. A fitting reversal of the relationship, really, even if it’s not the truth of things.
Speaking of Batsugun and fitting occurrences, it was Toaplan’s final completed shoot ‘em up. And while they published it in Japan, Taito was there to distribute it in Europe: eight years after their first work of partnership on Toaplan’s first STG, Taito was back again for their final one.
While Taito didn’t include Toaplan games that they published in some of the compilations they released in the decades since the studio’s closure, they’ve since gotten back to it. One wonders if the delay had something to do with the questions over rights, and who even had them, or if Taito was content with filling their Taito Legends duology, for instance, with their own impressive array of in-house shooters. Maybe it’s coincidence that the Egret II Mini arcade cabinet, which released in 2022, came about a few years after Tatsujin formed and collected the rights to Toaplan’s library, or maybe the reason there are a slew of Toaplan-developed games available on the mini cabinet’s base unit and its add-on cards is because Taito can actually work something out now, all without a bunch of legal loopholes or unanswerable questions about who has the rights to what and on what platforms, making “just put Gun Frontier on there instead” the easier path. The Japanese (but importable) Egret II Mini includes Tatsujin (known as Truxton overseas) and Kyukyoku Tiger (Twin Cobra) on the cabinet itself, with Daisenpu (Twin Hawk) and Slap Fight on Taito Egret II Mini Arcade Memories Vol. 1, while Wardner (Pyros) along with Takumi’s Kyukyoku Tiger II (Twin Cobra II) are included in Vol. 2 — all of those, besides Takumi’s entry, have a Tatsujin credit on them alongside Taito’s, where the latter is clearly marked as the publisher. Presumably, there will be more Arcade Memories volumes, and more Toaplan-developed games on them.
Taito also kept their word about the Toaplan games being recognized as Toaplan games going forward even for non-Taito re-releases. M2 has licensed nearly Toaplan’s entire library from Tatsujin for the Toaplan Arcade Garage series that’s part of the larger M2 ShotTriggers project, and it’s Toaplan’s name, not Taito’s, that appears on the title screens of the games they had previously distributed. It changes the history of how things were a little bit, yes, but it also reflects the nature of which company actually made the game, and given you’re reading a project about remembering a studio worth remembering, as you can imagine, I’m partial to the change. Still, we can remember Toaplan at all in no small part due to their relationship with Taito, which was used to put some industry-shaping classics in arcades all over Japan and around the world, and in turn helped to bolster Taito’s own profile while filling gaps in their internal production. It’s no wonder the two worked together so closely for so long, as the fit was perfect and worth maintaining.
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