Remembering Toaplan: Truxton

A game so vital to Toaplan's history that a successor studio named themselves using its Japanese moniker, Tatsujin.

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.

Let’s begin the discussion of Truxton with a little anecdote. In February of 2023, Bitwave games released, as part of a larger project to bring Toaplan’s arcade library to modern platforms, a port of Truxton to Windows. It’s been amassing players for a year now, at the cost of all of $8 at full price, which, to anyone who ever played it in an arcade, is an impossibly low barrier to entry for the chance to see Truxton’s five stages through to their end.

Play that conversion of Truxton on Steam, and there are achievements to unlock. Like the rest of the Bitwave games, Truxton has some assistance features, such as a rewind button, to help you through if you want to utilize them. Every time you destroy a boss, whether it’s a mini/midboss or a stage-ending one, an achievement pops: they’re numbered instead of by stage, which is how you know for sure that you’ve faced four bosses before you even get to the actual stage 1 boss, which has its own music and which fills up the screen and has a whole bunch of cannons you can’t even destroy unless they’re in the middle of firing, except when they’re firing you’re also dodging them. Oh, and popcorn enemies keep showing up on the side of the screen at regular, predictable intervals to catch you in the crossfire. It is truly the stage boss, no question.

Like achievements tend to do these days, Steam’s track the percentage of players who have played the game that managed to also secure the same congratulatory popup. The first mini-boss in Truxton, as of this writing, has been defeated by 66 percent of players of the game without utilizing assistance features: there’s one achievement for this feat, and another for defeating them by any means necessary. The second sees that rate drop to 51 percent, if you round up. The third, 23 percent, and the fourth, a mere 18 percent. Again, this is before the actual first boss even shows up on screen: players have already, in an obscene percentage of instances, decided they really needed to rewind or that they weren’t going to be able to complete… something in the first stage. Which is, by the way, much easier than most of what Truxton throws at the player, as is typical of both shoot ‘em ups in general and especially Toaplan’s, which aimed to make players feel like they could manage from the start in order to both teach and hook them on a title.

The Truxton title screen as it’s seen in its modern home release on Windows, through Bit Wave. Notice the Tatsujin credit instead of Taito.

The problem was that, as players became better and better at shooting games, the baseline for what was difficult and approachable began to change. As composer and designer Tatsuya Uemura explained in a 2012 interview with STG Gameside, this just sort of happened over time:

The games turned out to be quite difficult, but we didn’t deisgn [sic] them with the intention of “Hah, see if you can clear THIS!” 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. Though gradually everything started to be made more and more difficult for the hardcore players (laughs). In the end we sort of hung ourselves with our own rope.

…

Actually, we wanted to make our vertical shooters easier too, so we’d initially make them quite easy for our location tests, but then someone would 1cc [one-credit clear] them in one day and we’d end up dramatically raising the difficulty level.

No one was going to 1CC Tiger-Heli on day one in 1985, but as the Toaplan style — and the evolution of other shooting games continued on — became more familiar to players, and the challenge of the genre had to be continually ramped up… well, yeah, eventually Toaplan would get to a place where they developed a game, Dogyuun, that got so difficult in its late loops that a bug that froze the game and required a restart got through their normally intense QA rounds because, as Uemura explained, “I didn’t know about that. There wasn’t anyone in our development team who could clear 5 loops.” Hence the quote about “hanging ourselves with our own rope” — Toaplan created a generation of memorizing monsters. And they were raised in no small part by Truxton.

Truxton is merely the English release name for Tatsujin, a Japanese word and concept that describes an expert, a master, an adept, and philosophically, someone who has reached a higher state of consciousness. It’s fitting for this shooting game, because, as Toaplan’s 80s output so often was, it was designed as a memorizer. With work and repetition and focus, you, too, can master Truxton — can become Tatsujin! You’re going to die a lot before that happens, however. A lot.

Truxton is a crossroads game for Toaplan. It built on some of the progress made in Twin Cobra (Kyukyoku Tiger in Japan) that evolved their shoot ‘em up philosophy a bit: in that game, it still took quite a bit of effort to fully power up your helicopter, but nowhere near as long as Flying Shark’s plane, and you started out with a powerful three-way weapon, too. To compensate for becoming more powerful sooner, though, there were also far more enemies and bullets, and quicker, for you to contend with. So, the game’s difficulty rose in terms of your reactions and instincts, but there was also more to memorize, and multiple weapon types were introduced both to let players tailor their own style a bit, as well as to add another few puzzle pieces into the mix: each of the game’s four weapons had places where it was more effective to use and could help you out of jams the other weapons might not, or at least not with ease and a more obvious solution. (Yes, even the loathed yellow power-up has its uses in Twin Cobra, it’s true.)

You would think the enormous blue fire skull would be something your opponent fired off, but no, that’s your bomb, and it kicks ass.

Truxton was the next shooting game (STG) that Toaplan would release after Twin Cobra, and it saw them shift into a fully-realized sci-fi world and concept. Outside of Slap Fight, which was sci-fi but still based on a planet, Toaplan stuck with classic military themes and settings, and tended toward more realistic depictions of anything they could. Truxton took things to space itself, with each stage an approach through the vast darkness of space toward a military installation located on asteroids, and evolved Twin Cobra’s weapons system even further. The standout here is the enormous blue laser that is also a pseudo homing shot: it will fire from your ship in an endless beam, and then target and coil itself around a foe until they eventually explode. It upgrades to a three-beam shot that can do this to multiple foes — or target a single one with extreme prejudice — and in its fully powered form, there are five beams. It’s not all-powerful, since it has a bit of a mind of its own and therefore can leave you susceptible to fire from other foes you can’t target while its doing its thing to its chosen victim, but it’s still terrifyingly strong, versatile in a fires-in-all-directions way, and looks sick due to being these massive electrified blue beams that explode through the ink-black darkness of space.

According to an interview with STG Chronicle in 2012, the idea for the laser actually came to composer and designer Masahiro Yuge in a dream:

I wanted to make a game where the more you remembered, the better you would become. I focused on adding a lot of sections where you needed a specific weapon to deal with certain attacks. One day, when I was half-asleep, I bumped my head and woke up from a dream I was having with this Laser in it… so I really wanted to add that too.

Thankfully it did not become Toaplan policy to smack your head into things in order to find inspiration. The laser certainly grabbed attention during the game’s attract mode, or if you saw someone playing the game using it. As Yuge detailed in his own interview with STG Gameside, “When a player would unleash the fully charged Tatsujin laser, the people next to him would look at the player’s face and see it fully aglow with reflected blue light. (laughs) It sounds creepy but it was somehow really cool.” There were also the skull bombs, which would explode into this huge blue fire that first took the form of a skull that looked as if it were screaming, before a series of flashes and explosions further damaged anything unfortunate enough to come into its range. The bombs don’t just look killer, they’re also incredibly useful. Truxton, notably, does not award you any kind of post-stage bonus at all, never mind for not using bombs, and the message is clear: you have bombs in order to use them.

While Truxton is a difficult game for newcomers who haven’t muscle memoried the entire thing into their systems through years of practice, it’s not an unfair one. There are many different enemy types in its five stages and subsequent loops, all with unique patterns to learn and avoid. The bosses are large, but aren’t just variations of tanks that are larger than usual with more guns, as was Toaplan’s style for some time. You can see the move toward the designs they’d populate their 1990s shooters with begin here in earnest. The mini-bosses are basically the kinds of bosses you’d see in previous Toaplan games, and sometimes three or four of them at a time on screen at once, so even when there’s familiarity Toaplan decided to ratchet things up. There are more bullets and foes than in past Toaplan shooters, and plenty of them come from behind you when you aren’t paying enough attention, but Truxton also features way more power-ups, and your ship’s slow speed is a temporary issue.

You can speed up in Truxton, to the point of going real fast, and you’re going to need to if you plan to weave in and out of the waves of bullets that come at you from multiple directions: Yuge has said that Toaplan’s oldest shooters had slower ship speeds because going faster would mean they needed more bullets to compensate for the lowered difficulty that would bring, and it turns out this was not a mischaracterization of how they’d address going faster.

Beginning in stage three, you’ll find yourself awash in power-ups, but it’s not out of a sense of mercy. It’s because you’re going to need them. Almost the entire approach of stage three finds you battling enemy forces while collecting speed power-up and bomb after speed power-up and bomb, which can also result in 5,000 bonus points in the case of the former if you’ve already maxed out your speed. So you might gain an extend here, as well, and it’s something of a reprieve in that sense, but again, you’re still fighting through it all, and it’s to prepare you for what’s ahead. Like when you suddenly find a bunch of ammunition in a classic Resident Evil title and instinctively know that this is bad news, not good.

The game’s art direction is eye-catching, and the only issue is that the backgrounds in the approach stages can be a bit boring to look at: if not for the mostly black space backgrounds with some light background stars and the occasional stellar object, you might be able to convince someone who should know better that Truxton released later than its 1988 date. Those backgrounds betray the truth of the matter, though, but would thankfully be rectified in the sequel, Truxton II, a game that looks incredible without caveat but went comparatively overlooked since it was designed with hardcore players in mind from the start.

Truxton not only represented a new direction for Toaplan that opened them up to future sci-fi projects, more and more ambitious weapon design, a flashier presentation, and an acceptance of difficulty levels that were going to begin to turn your average player off, but it was also where Toaplan first made a console port of one of their games. To this point, Toaplan hadn’t had a say or anything to do with any of the ports of their games, but since the architecture between the Sega Genesis and the machines they used to develop their arcade hits of the day was similar enough, they decided to port Truxton themselves, with Sega publishing.

It’s not the greatest port going. There’s not anything wrong with it, but it’s also clear Toaplan didn’t do everything they could to make it work as well as their arcade games did in their native setting. Which members of the team have even admitted in the years since. Yuge explained that they had all of a month to port Truxton over, which became a problem when “the scrolling didn’t match up” and “the color palette wasn’t sufficient,” a problem that’s still notable in the final release, where the blackness of space is more like the very dark blue-tintedness of space. And for the first half of that month they didn’t even know how sound worked on the Genesis/Mega Drive, which created a problem for two of the three regional versions of the port. Per Yuge:

…I have this one bad memory that I’ve always wanted to apologize for, and that’s the tempo being too fast in the Tatsujin port. We didn’t receive any instructions from Sega on the sound hardware until 2 weeks before the mastering deadline. So I was really rushing to program everything and get the data coded, and we didn’t have a lot of time to tweak things, and that fast tempo resulted.

The sound is running so that it’s optimized for PAL systems running on PAL televisions, which were different than the Japanese and North American ones. So it’s sped up, noticeably so. And even without the extra pacing, which doesn’t quite match what’s happening on screen or the vibe of Truxton if you’re familiar with the original release, it just doesn’t quite sound right. Here’s the arcade version of “Far Away,” the theme used in the first stage:

And here’s the Genesis/Mega Drive version of the song, which plays as a game that goes the same speed as the original one does. It is jarring:

Combined with slowdown that isn’t present in the arcade original, the glaring audio issue and visual downgrade keeps this from being a great port of an excellent game. The good news is that it’s still an extremely playable port of an excellent game, and, aside from the oddness of the audio thing, none of the other issues are real problems. And even the soundtrack is something you can get used to — hell, the interviewer who spoke to Yuge about the songs simply thought it was a remix and not a mistake.

That being said, Truxton’s issues in its Genesis port are more notable because of the conversion it was competing against, which Taito, the publisher of Truxton (and so many other Toaplan titles) in arcades put out on the PC Engine. Taito didn’t develop the port themselves, but contracted it out to Sting for release in 1992. If you remember your history of Compile, then you also recall that Sting was formed by ex-Compile developers — meaning, it’s a studio that knows its shoot ‘em ups, even if it wasn’t formed by the primarily STG developers. Unsurprisingly, the Tatsujin port on the PC Engine — Tatsujin, not Truxton, because it only received a Japanese PC Engine release and not an international Turbografx-16 one — has the look of a Compile game in terms of its HUD. Instead of the black bar on the side and the chopped up viewing area lost in the conversion from a TATE-oriented cabinet to a home CRT, Tatsujin looks as if it was always meant to be on the PC Engine. Since Taito gave Sting more than the month of development that Sega gave Toaplan, that difference in the two makes a lot of sense.

Here’s what “Far Away” sounds like on the PC Engine, by the way:

It has more of that “full band” vibe that Toaplan’s composers were always hoping for out of older hardware they couldn’t quite wring it out of until later in their existence, and, most importantly, it fits the feel of Truxton’s arcade edition. It sounds different, but in ways that help the already excellent soundtrack out: it sounds a little spacier, really, which is what a sci-fi game set in space should sound like. And it also plays at the correct speed, that helps, too.

And the last comparison: there’s nothing wrong with the Genesis or Mega Drive box art for Truxton, which looks great.

But next to the PC Engine box art… it’s no contest.

Don’t be too distracted by how kick ass that box art is that you miss that Taito credited Toaplan right there on the cover: they really did keep their promise about retroactive crediting post-Truxton’s arcade release.

Toaplan’s ports would end up improving — by the time they got to Snow Bros. on the Genesis, they added in a whole bunch of new, exclusive stages just for the port, even — but again we can presume this is not just familiarity but also because they had more than a single month to handle their business there.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of Truxton to Toaplan. It ushered in a new era for them where sci-fi became something of a norm, and their designs really opened up in some fascinating, memorable ways from that point forward, which in turn enticed some up-and-coming artists to the studio, who would go on to do bigger and better things post-Toaplan’s closure. It feels like the game where they accepted that difficulty was going to have to ramp up in new and exciting ways, that the slow speed of their past that could only be rectified with faster and more bullets from enemies was now a problem to solve with those faster bullets, of which there would be more of, to boot. It was the beginning of Toaplan’s ports to consoles, and also the game that convinced Taito that Toaplan’s name belonged on the title screen of the game’s they distributed, such was their reputation now.

There’s a reason that Yuge, when he founded a successor studio in 2017 to collect the rights to Toaplan’s games and keep them alive and available, named it Tatsujin. It’s because of the importance of that game to Toaplan, and to Yuge, who played such an integral role in its creation alongside artists and designers like Naoki Ogiwara, but it’s also because, fittingly for the term, “Tatsujin” is the form Toaplan ascended to after its death. The difference between here and in philosophical enlightment and mastery, however, is that Toaplan is dead, and Tatsujin is here: and they’re making another Truxton game in the present, even, to be released in 2024. Whether Tatsujin can show the mastery and expertise of its predecessor remains to be seen, but regardless, we’ve still got the original Truxton to go to now, and, whenever Bitwave or M2 get around to it, we’ll get its underrated — and even more difficult — sequel, as well.

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