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Seibu Kaihatsu

The Tokyo arcade house behind Raiden

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Seibu Kaihatsu began in 1982 as Seibu Denshi, made a string of arcade games through the 1980s, many of them sold under Taito's name, and in 1990 produced Raiden, the vertical shooter that kept it going. Its last arcade game was Raiden Fighters Jet in 1998; former staff founded MOSS, which has made the Raiden games since Raiden III.

When Raiden reached the arcades in 1990, Retro Gamer‘s Stuart Campbell later wrote, it came from a “little-known Japanese developer”. Seibu Kaihatsu had by then been making arcade games for eight years, but many of them had gone out under other companies’ names. Raiden changed that. It stayed in the arcade charts for more than three years, and Seibu spent most of the following decade making more of it.

Fast facts

  • Founded: 1982, in Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, as Seibu Denshi; renamed Seibu Kaihatsu around 1984.
  • Known for: Raiden (1990) and its sequels, and the Raiden Fighters games.
  • Last arcade game: Raiden Fighters Jet, 1998.
  • Afterwards: former staff founded MOSS, which has made the Raiden games since Raiden III (2005).

Seibu Denshi and the Taito years

The company’s first two games, Stinger (1983) and Scion (1984), carry the name Seibu Denshi. Much of what followed went out through other companies. MAME’s drivers credit Wiz, Knuckle Joe, Panic Road, The Lost Castle in Darkmist and Empire City: 1931 to “Seibu Kaihatsu (Taito license)”, and from the late 1980s the American company Fabtek distributed its games outside Japan.

Dead Angle (1988) shows where the company was heading. It was not a light-gun game. The player steered a gunsight around a scrolling street in 1920s America, shooting gangsters to rescue a kidnapped girlfriend, while an outline of the hero’s own body showed where return fire would land. ZZAP!64 thought it “a fairly tepid affair”; Sinclair User found it “more stylish graphically” than Operation Wolf. Dynamite Duke followed the same idea, a shooting gallery with the hero on screen, and added close combat: hold the button and Duke throws a charged “super dynamite punch”. Mean Machines counted three versions in the arcades, the last of them, The Double Dynamites, for two players at once.

Raiden

Raiden was the recovery. Campbell’s account in Retro Gamer has it looking at first like one more copy of Toaplan’s Flying Shark, and then outlasting nearly everything around it: a fighter with two switchable guns, a spreading Vulcan cannon and a narrow laser, two kinds of missile, and plain, hard stages of tanks, battleships and planes. “Sticking with this seeming relic,” Edge wrote in 2002, “almost killed off original developer Seibu Kaihatsu”. The Raiden entry tells the game’s own story and that of its many conversions.

The sequels came slowly at first. Raiden II arrived at the end of 1993 and added the purple Plasma Laser that players nicknamed the “Toothpaste” laser. Raiden DX (1994) reworked Raiden II rather than remaking the first game: its Novice mode is five Raiden II stages, but it added a training stage of a single 15-minute level, an all-boss Special Stage played against the clock, and an Expert mode of nine new stages. Campbell called its later PlayStation version “the finest shmup of its generation”.

Seibu also published its own home conversion. Raiden Project, both games on one PlayStation disc, appeared in Japan within two months of the console’s launch. Richard Honeywood, who joined Seibu as an arcade programmer in 1994 and worked on Raiden II, Viper Phase 1 and Senkyu, has said the company could not at first afford to make it. When Sony asked for a launch title, he told Time Extension, the boss, Hitoshi Hamada, said “We don’t have enough money to fund it”, and a member of staff suggested paying for it with a strip mahjong game for the arcades. Honeywood’s explanation: “It’s because they’re guaranteed money”.

A new board and the Raiden Fighters

In 1995 Seibu moved its games to new hardware. Edge described the SPI-32 board in 1996: an Intel 386DX processor with a custom graphics chip, with each game’s data on a separate board that plugged in “as cartridge software does in a console”. The first game for it was Viper Phase 1, a two-player vertical shooter over eight stages. Its lead programmer, Mr Sakai, explained what was new: “the new game is always going to match the player’s level”, so that people who had not played a shoot-’em-up for a while could “make some progress”. While “the coin-op world goes polygon crazy”, Edge noted, Seibu was “content to continue wringing life out of sprite-based concepts”. Campbell saw Viper Phase 1 as the link between the two branches of the family: its Judge Spear ship and much of its weaponry turned up again in Raiden Fighters.

Raiden Fighters (1996) ran on the same board and let players choose from several planes. Raiden Fighters 2: Operation Hell Dive (1997) and Raiden Fighters Jet (1998) followed quickly, and Jet was the company’s last arcade game.

After the arcades

What happened to the company itself is told differently. Time Extension says Seibu Kaihatsu went bankrupt. Wikipedia, drawing on Japanese sources, says its arcade division disappeared in 1999 and that the company “temporarily disbanded itself”, and the Shmups Wiki says it survives as a company that holds rights. The series went on without it. In 2002 Edge reported a small new studio, New World System, reviving Raiden Fighters for the Xbox. MOSS, founded by Toshinobu Komazawa and other former Seibu staff, took on the licence in 2005 and has made the Raiden games since Raiden III.

Sources

  • Retro Gamer issue 26, 2006, pp. 64–69: Stuart Campbell, “The Ultimate Guide: Raiden” (the “little-known Japanese developer”; three years in the charts; Raiden 2 and the Toothpaste laser; Raiden DX’s Novice, Training, Special and Expert modes and “the finest shmup of its generation”; Viper Phase 1, 1995, and its links to Raiden Fighters).
  • ZZAP!64 issue 39, July 1988, arcade column: Dead Angle (the 1920s setting, the gunsight, “a fairly tepid affair”).
  • Sinclair User issue 76, July 1988, arcade column: Dead Angle (the outline of the player’s body; “more stylish graphically” than Operation Wolf).
  • Mean Machines issue 3, December 1990: “Triple Duke” panel on the three arcade versions of Dynamite Duke and the “super dynamite punch”.
  • Edge issue 33, June 1996: Viper Phase 1 review (the SPI-32 board, Sakai on the difficulty, “wringing life out of sprite-based concepts”).
  • Edge issue 116, November 2002: Raiden Fighters (Xbox) preview, New World System (“almost killed off original developer Seibu Kaihatsu”).
  • Edge issue 159, February 2006: Richard Honeywood on joining Seibu Kaihatsu as an arcade programmer in 1994.
  • Edge issue 16, January 1995, and issue 19, April 1995: Raiden and Raiden Project on the PlayStation; Raiden II “at the end of 1993”.
  • Damien McFerran, “‘They’re Guaranteed Money’: When The PlayStation Raiden Project Was In Doubt, Seibu Kaihatsu Turned To Strip Mahjong”, Time Extension, 29 January 2026 (web, secondary): Honeywood’s account of Hamada and the funding. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2026/01/theyre-guaranteed-money-when-the-playstation-raiden-project-was-in-doubt-seibu-kaihatsu-turned-to-strip-mahjong
  • Damien McFerran, “You can expect more Raiden games, says MOSS CEO”, Time Extension, 7 July 2023 (web, secondary): Komazawa and former Seibu staff founded MOSS “when that company went bankrupt”. https://timeextension.com/news/2023/07/you-can-expect-more-raiden-games-says-moss-ceo
  • Wikipedia, “Seibu Kaihatsu” (web, secondary): founding as Seibu Denshi; Fabtek’s distribution; the arcade division’s end in 1999. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seibu_Kaihatsu
  • Shmups Wiki, “Seibu Kaihatsu” (web, secondary): the company as a rights holder after it left the arcade business. https://shmups.wiki/library/Seibu_Kaihatsu
  • MAME source code, src/mame/seibu drivers (web, secondary): manufacturer credits for the Seibu Denshi, Taito-licensed and Fabtek-licensed games, and release years. https://github.com/mamedev/mame/tree/master/src/mame/seibu

See also

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