Darius | Code Like It's 198x

Most arcade games of the 1980s fitted on one monitor. Darius needed three. Taito set them side by side behind a wide cockpit, so the playfield of a horizontally scrolling shoot-’em-up became a panorama about three times wider than usual, and joined them so cleanly that Sinclair User’s arcade reporter could find “no joining lines to be seen”. One or two players sat on a seat that shook with every explosion. At the end of each zone an armoured mechanical fish the size of a battleship came in from the right, and after it was destroyed the player chose which way to go next. When the machine was shown in London in January 1987, the Newsfield magazines called it “the first time a shoot ’em up has been given the triple-screen treatment”.

Fast facts

Developer and publisher: Taito.
First shown: the ATEI trade show in London, January 1987; released in Japan in February 1987.
Cabinet: three monitors forming one wide picture, a cockpit for two players and a vibrating seat.
Structure: 26 zones lettered A to Z, arranged in seven tiers; one game passes through seven of them.
At home: Super Darius on the PC Engine CD-ROM² (1990), Darius+ from The Edge (1989–90) and a Mega Drive version in 2019.

Three screens and a shaking seat

The cabinet put the screens next to each other, and the game scrolled across all three at once. Sega Retro, describing the original, says the three monitors were combined with one-way mirrors to make one seamless widescreen picture. The wide view changed how the game played. Sinclair User’s Clare Edgeley, reporting from the ATEI show, wrote that “you can see what’s being thrown at you long before the enemy strikes”, and that the “vibrating seat … makes your bum shake with each explosion heightening the impression of the inside of a battleship cockpit”. The CRASH and ZZAP!64 reporter was less sure. Nothing about the game was “amazingly innovative … apart from the vibro-seat”, and it was “good for a couple of plays to see how neatly the backdrops scroll from screen to screen, but likely to become uninspiring fairly quickly”.

Two players could fly together, each in a Silver Hawk fighter; Sega Retro names the pilots as Proco and Tiat. Your Sinclair’s seaside arcade round-up in 1987 found that a one-player game cost 30p and a two-player game 60p, and its reporter said the game “left me buzzing with excitement”.

Zones, fish and power-ups

The map is a pyramid. The first zone, A, branches into B and C, those into D, E and F, and so on through seven tiers to the five final zones, V to Z. At the end of each zone the player flies up or down to choose the next. Only seven zones can be played in one game, and with two ways into zones V and Z there are 28 places on the map for 26 lettered zones. Computer and Video Games later counted “sector one of 28” in the home version.

The bosses are what people remembered. Sinclair User described “a magnificent monster battle fish” at the end of each level, “each with its own weak spot”, with “wonderful names like Fatty Glutton”. The arcade game had eleven bosses, one shared by every zone of a tier for the first six tiers and a different one for each of the five final zones. The first is King Fossil and the one waiting in zone Z is Great Thing. Wikipedia, citing a developers’ round-table in the Japanese magazine Gamest in 1987, says the designer Junji Yarita drew 26 boss designs, of which eleven were used, and that each boss took about ten days to make.

The Silver Hawk fires forward and drops bombs, and both can be upgraded. Enemies coloured red, green or blue leave capsules of the same colour: red builds up the main shot from missiles to lasers and then waves that pass through walls, green adds more bombs firing in more directions, and blue gives a shield that absorbs several hits. Losing a ship loses the upgrades.

Sound

Retro Gamer names Hisayoshi Ogura, who joined Taito in 1983 and is credited in its games as OGR, as known for his work on Darius. He is one of six composers named in the credits that the 2019 Mega Drive version carries. Taito formed its sound team and in-house band, Zuntata, in 1987, with Ogura often cited as its leader, and Retro Gamer lists Darius among Zuntata’s key works.

A hit in Japan, rare in Britain

Wikipedia reports that the Japanese trade paper Game Machine listed Darius as the most popular upright arcade machine in Japan in April 1987. British players saw much less of it. Your Sinclair said in 1990 that “although it was a real slammer of an arcade machine it didn’t get a great deal of attention”, and Computer and Video Games that the coin-op “was never a big hit in the arcades”, because not many arcades could afford it.

Home versions

NEC’s PC Engine CD-ROM² got Super Darius in 1990. Edge later called it “a memorable conversion”, running “in a humble 64K of RAM”; it gave every zone its own boss, adding fifteen to the arcade’s eleven.

In Britain, The Edge bought the licence and gave it to the team behind its conversion of Alien Syndrome, which, Your Sinclair reported, had Taito’s permission “to enhance and update” the game as Darius+. Its 1990 advertisement listed the Amiga, Atari ST, Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, PC and Commodore 64, with the line “game enhancement and coding (c) 1989 The Edge/Softek”. Squeezing three screens of game onto one was the problem. Amiga Action found that the large sprites “didn’t look out of place” across three screens, but in the conversion they made manoeuvring tight and the screen cluttered: “a playable shoot’em-up, but not a close conversion of the game it is trying to emulate”. Computer and Video Games gave the Amiga version 79%, praising “those sub-aquatic boss aliens”, but confessed that its reviewer kept playing “more to see the graphics than to relish the destructive delights of the gameplay”.

Taito had once planned a Mega Drive version and dropped it. One finally appeared in 2019, built by M2 from a fan’s proof-of-concept port and included on Sega’s Mega Drive Mini, and it was sold on cartridge as Darius Extra Version from 2020.

The series

Darius II (1989), known outside Japan as Sagaia. ZZAP! reported that “the wonderful three-screen cabinet has been trimmed down slightly with two screens making up the playing area (still twice as much as any other coin-op around)”.
Darius Twin (1991) for the Super NES, which Nintendo Power described as the console’s first shoot-’em-up “which allows for two-player simultaneous action”.
Darius Gaiden (1994). Edge saw it at the JAMMA show in 1994 as “the third game in Darius series”, with “more shields, extra weapons and hidden areas”; reviewing the Saturn version in 1996, it gave it six out of ten.
Dariusburst: Another Chronicle (Japan 2010, Britain 2011). Its cabinet joined two 32-inch LCD screens into one super-wide display for four players, with artwork that, in Edge’s words, “pays homage to the original ’80s Darius cabinet design”.

Sources

Sinclair User issue 61, April 1987, p. 86: Clare Edgeley’s ATEI report (“three screens wide”, “no joining lines”, the vibrating seat, the battle fish and Fatty Glutton, the choice of paths).
CRASH issue 39, April 1987, p. 35, and ZZAP!64 issue 24, April 1987, p. 53: the same ATEI report (“the first time a shoot ’em up has been given the triple-screen treatment”, “apart from the vibro-seat”, “uninspiring fairly quickly”).
Your Sinclair issue 21, September 1987, pp. 81–82: seaside arcade round-up (the Silver Hawk, 30p and 60p, “left me buzzing with excitement”). Issue 51, March 1990, p. 89: Darius+ preview (the Alien Syndrome team, Taito’s permission to enhance the game, “didn’t get a great deal of attention”).
ZZAP! issue 56, December 1989, p. 42: Sagaia (Darius 2) arcade report.
Computer and Video Games issue 98, January 1990, p. 92: Darius Plus Amiga review (79%; “never a big hit in the arcades”; “sector one of 28”). Issue 102, May 1990, p. 15: The Edge’s Darius+ advertisement (formats; “Darius (c) 1987 Taito Corporation”; “coding (c) 1989 The Edge/Softek”).
Amiga Action issue 5, February 1990, p. 86: Darius+ review.
Nintendo Power issue 30, November 1991, p. 96: Darius Twin.
Edge issue 15, December 1994, p. 12: JAMMA show report (Darius Gaiden). Issue 30, March 1996, p. 55: Darius Gaiden Saturn review (1987 in Japanese arcades; the PC Engine CD-ROM conversion; six out of ten). Issue 231, September 2011, p. 22: Dariusburst: Another Chronicle (the twin-screen cabinet, four players).
Retro Gamer issue 45, 2007, p. 38: “Zuntata: Taito rocks” (Zuntata formed in 1987; Hisayoshi Ogura, OGR, joining Taito in 1983 and known for Darius).
Sega Retro, “Darius” (web, secondary): the mirrors and three monitors; Proco and Tiat; the 26 zones, the tiers and the eleven arcade bosses by name; the capsules and weapons; Super Darius’s extra bosses; the cancelled Mega Drive port, M2 and the Mega Drive Mini; the in-game credits. https://segaretro.org/Darius ; “Darius Extra Version”: https://segaretro.org/Darius_Extra_Version
Wikipedia, “Darius (video game)” (web, secondary): the ATEI debut and February 1987 Japanese release; the Game Machine chart of April 1987; Junji Yarita’s 26 boss designs, from Gamest issue 10, July 1987; Super Darius’s release in 1990. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darius_(video_game)