Toaplan | Code Like It's 198x

For about ten years Toaplan made shoot-’em-ups, and almost nothing else. The studio’s own name is not on many of its early games, which Taito sold as its own, but players knew the house style: a small ship or helicopter, a screen-clearing bomb for emergencies, enemies that fired with unnerving accuracy, and music that drove the action along. Edge called Toaplan “the Japanese masters” of the vertically scrolling shooter. Its last arcade game, Batsugun (1993), filled the screen with bullets and is often dated as the start of the “bullet hell” style that its former staff carried on at Cave. Toaplan went bankrupt in 1994. Most people who know its name today know it from a mistranslation in Zero Wing: “All your base are belong to us”.

Fast facts

Active: 1984 to 1994, in Tokyo.
Founders: staff of two failed developers, Orca and Crux. Wireframe names programmers Tatsuya Uemura and Masahiro Yuge as founder members; both also wrote music for the games.
The name: Wireframe translates it roughly as “East Asia Project”.
Publishers: Taito marketed many of its games in the 1980s, among them Tiger-Heli and Flying Shark. From about 1989 Toaplan published under its own name.
Best-known games: Tiger-Heli (1985), Slap Fight (1986), Flying Shark (1987), Twin Cobra (1987), Truxton (Tatsujin, 1988), Hellfire and Zero Wing (1989), Fire Shark (1989), Out Zone and Snow Bros. (1990), Batsugun (1993).
Successors: Cave, Raizing (also called Eighting or 8ing) and Gazelle were all set up by former Toaplan staff.

From an apartment building

Toaplan was made from the wreckage of two other companies. According to Wireframe, staff from two short-lived developers that had collapsed set it up in a Tokyo apartment building. Sega Retro names them as Orca, an arcade maker, and Crux, which went bankrupt within a year of being founded. Two of the founding programmers, Tatsuya Uemura and Masahiro Yuge, composed the soundtracks for their own games. That, Wireframe suggested, is why Toaplan’s games so often felt as driven by their music as by their action.

The first hit was Tiger-Heli in 1985. Taito published it in Japan and Romstar in North America, and it reached home consoles including the NES. The player flies a helicopter against an army of tanks and gun emplacements, with a bomb for clearing the screen. Toaplan kept reworking that bomb in later games: in Truxton it became a giant screaming skull.

Under Taito’s name

Toaplan worked under contract for Taito in the second half of the 1980s. Retro Gamer’s history of Taito describes how, after the American arcade slump of 1983, Taito again looked for outside developers, “sub-contracting Toaplan to produce a number of vertically scrolling shoot-’em-ups such as Flying Shark and Truxton”. Wireframe noted that Flying Shark was “quietly made by Toaplan” though Taito marketed it.

Players noticed the difference anyway. In 1994 Edge looked back at Flying Shark, a 1987 biplane game, and called it “a veritable masterpiece”. “From the outside, Toaplan’s games looked little different to the coin-ops from competing companies,” it wrote. “However, usually lurking underneath was their hallmark — painfully challenging gameplay.” The magazine praised its explosions, its enemy planes plunging into the ground behind a trail of smoke and its music, “something Toaplan always delivered in its games”. Its home versions were made by others: Graftgold wrote the Spectrum one for Telecomsoft.

According to Sega Retro, the Taito contract lasted until 1989, after which Toaplan published its own games. Many of them reached the Mega Drive and the PC Engine.

Zero Wing and “All your base”

Zero Wing is a horizontally scrolling shooter from 1989. Wireframe reported, citing interviews with former staff, that it was never meant to be released: it began as a training project for new programmers to sharpen their skills on.

Its fame came twelve years later. The opening scene of the European Mega Drive version has a villain announce “All your base are belong to us” in clumsy English. In 2001, Edge reported, internet users began adding the phrase to famous photographs and assembled them into a Flash movie that spread quickly. Edge called it “comfortably the most famous of all videogame mistranslations”.

Batsugun

Batsugun (1993) was Toaplan’s last arcade shooter. In September 1994 it was at number seven in Edge’s chart of arcade circuit boards. Retro Gamer has written that its arcade release “heralded the beginning” of the danmaku, or bullet hell, shooter, in which enemy fire fills the screen. Retro Gamer explained how Batsugun stayed fair: although the screen “gets swamped with bullets”, the player’s ship has a “tiny hitbox”, the small area that counts as a hit (see hit boxes). Wireframe called the game Toaplan’s “swansong” and said its waves of bullets pointed to the shooters that one of its successors, Cave, would make. A Sega Saturn version followed in 1996, reworked by Gazelle.

Bankruptcy and successors

Wireframe put the company’s decline down to its focus on shoot-’em-ups as arcades turned to fighting games such as Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat. Uemura gave his own reason: “We were able to make what we wanted – in that sense, it was incredibly fun. Though it might be why we went bankrupt.” In February 1996 Edge told a reader that Toaplan “were superb designers of vertical shoot ’em ups and sadly went bust over a year ago”.

Its people kept making shooters. Retro Gamer described Raizing, the studio behind Battle Garegga, as “formed from the remains of legendary developer Toaplan”, and described Eighting, the same studio under another name, as made up mostly of former Toaplan staff. Gazelle made Air Gallet (1996). Cave, whose chief programmer Tsuneki Ikeda had worked on Batsugun, made DonPachi (1995), DoDonPachi (1997) and a long line of bullet hell games after them (see shoot-’em-up). In the same reply Edge said that most of Toaplan’s designers had gone to form Tamsoft, the developer of the fighting game Toshinden.

The games come back

The games themselves went to other publishers. In 1996 Banpresto licensed Toaplan’s arcade catalogue and began issuing compilations for the PlayStation, starting with Tiger-Heli and Twin Cobra. Edge hoped “the entire Toaplan catalogue” would follow.

The rights later came home. Sega Retro records that Tatsujin, a company founded in 2017 and named after the Japanese title of Truxton, holds the licence for the Toaplan back catalogue, and that Uemura and Yuge work there. Under Tatsujin the games have been reissued as Toaplan Arcade Garage collections developed by M2, as new Mega Drive cartridges and on Nintendo Switch Online. In 2022, Sega Retro records, the Swedish group Embracer bought Tatsujin.

Sources

“Developer Profile: Toaplan”, Wireframe issue 13, May 2019, pp. 50–53: 1984 to 1994; the two collapsed firms and the Tokyo apartment building; Uemura and Yuge; “East Asia Project”; Tiger-Heli’s bomb and Truxton’s skull; Flying Shark “quietly made by Toaplan”; Zero Wing as a training project; the decline as fighting games took over; Uemura’s quotation; Gazelle and Air Gallet, Cave; Batsugun as “swansong”.
Wireframe issue 45, November 2020, p. 64: Tiger-Heli (1985), published by Taito in Japan and Romstar in North America. Wireframe issue 66, September 2022, p. 78: closure in 1994; music by Yuge or Uemura.
Edge issue 10, July 1994, p. 80: Retroview, Flying Shark (Taito, developed by Toaplan, 1987).
Edge issue 12, September 1994, p. 83: arcade chart (Batsugun at seven).
Edge issue 29, February 1996, p. 76: letters (Toaplan “went bust over a year ago”; designers at Tamsoft).
Edge issue 33, June 1996, p. 69, and issue 41, January 1997, p. 86: the Banpresto licence and PlayStation compilations.
Edge issue 159, February 2006, pp. 66–71: feature on localisation, with the “All your base” panel.
Mike Bevan, feature on Taito’s F series arcade hardware, Retro Gamer issue 45, 2007, p. 38: Taito “sub-contracting Toaplan” for Flying Shark and Truxton.
Retro Gamer issue 42, 2007, p. 54: history of the shoot-’em-up (Batsugun and the start of danmaku). Retro Gamer issue 45, 2007, p. 30: Battle Garegga (Raizing “formed from the remains” of Toaplan). Retro Gamer issue 106, 2012, p. 46: Eighting “formed mostly from former Toaplan staff”.
Retro Gamer: The Ultimate Retro Companion, volume 2 (Imagine Publishing, 2008), pp. 60–62: Batsugun as Toaplan’s last arcade shooter, its bullets and “tiny hitbox”; Tsuneki Ikeda.
Sega Retro, “Toaplan” and “Tatsujin (company)” (database, web, secondary): Orca and Crux; the Taito contract to 1989; the 1994 bankruptcy; the Mega Drive releases; Tatsujin, founded 2017, holder of the back catalogue, and its sale to Embracer Group in 2022. https://segaretro.org/Toaplan