Three years after Ghosts ’n Goblins, Capcom sent the knight Arthur back into the demon world, and this time the hardware had caught up with the idea. Ghouls ’n Ghosts, Daimakaimura (“Great Demon World Village”) in Japan, was the second game Capcom built for its new CP System arcade board, after Forgotten Worlds. Its first stage opens in a graveyard where the wind picks up, the rain comes down and the ground tilts into slopes, and the zombies climb out of it as before. Arthur still loses his armour at the first touch and turns into a pile of bones at the second. Players who fought all the way to the last door found that they were not allowed through it, and were sent back to the start to do the whole game again.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Capcom, arcade, 1988, on the CP System board.
- Japanese title: Daimakaimura.
- Hero: Arthur, in armour that survives one hit; a second hit kills him.
- New to the series: throwing straight up and down, treasure chests, gold armour with charged attacks, and a magician who turns Arthur into an old man or a duck.
- The ending: the final boss can only be fought with the Psycho Cannon, which is found only on a second run through the game.
- Home versions: Sega for the Mega Drive (1989) and Master System; a version for NEC’s SuperGrafx; Software Creations for U.S. Gold on the Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Amiga and Atari ST (1989–90); Capcom’s own version for the Sharp X68000 (1994).
- Series: Ghosts ’n Goblins (1985), Ghouls ’n Ghosts (1988), Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts (1991).
Back in the arcades
The game was first seen at the JAMMA show in Tokyo late in 1988. The Games Machine’s report from the show found that “the follow-up to Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins also looks extremely good”. By the start of 1989 it was in British arcades at 30p a go. ACE thought it great fun, especially for players who had enjoyed the original, and CRASH’s arcade column, reviewing Capcom’s next CP System game, Strider, reckoned it was one of the best platform and ladders games ever made “apart from maybe Ghouls’N’Ghosts”.
Retro Gamer’s history of the series describes a game that improved on the first in every direction. Arthur and his surroundings “looked better than ever”, the bosses made those of the first game “seem puny by comparison”, and there were weather effects. He could now throw his weapon straight up, and straight down in mid-jump. Some enemies still dropped new weapons, and Arthur swapped his lance for whichever one he touched last: daggers, an axe, a sword, a discus, or a fire bomb that set the ground alight.
Treasure chests were the new gamble. They burst out of the scenery, some only when Arthur jumped at a particular spot, and a few shots broke them open. Inside might be a new weapon or a suit of gold armour. Or there might be a magician, who turned Arthur into a helpless old man or, in armour, a duck. The gold armour let Arthur hold down the fire button to charge a “super” attack that depended on the weapon he carried: a lightning bolt with the lance, for example, or a copy of himself that fought alongside him with the daggers.
Capcom’s programmers got some of the effects by trickery. Fabien Sanglard’s study of the CP System hardware shows that the first stage’s storm used almost every layer the board had: one for the sky, two for the scenery and the ground, sprites for Arthur, the enemies and the large raindrops, and the top layer for the score. There was nothing left to draw the rain on. So every five frames the game left out the score and drew a full screen of rain tiles in its place, and the flicker read as rainfall.
Tokuro Fujiwara, who created the series, was modest about it when Retro Gamer asked in 2006 whether he was proud of the sequel: “I am personally very happy with the way Ghouls ’N Ghosts turned out, very happy indeed.”
Twice round
Reaching the end once is not enough. When Arthur arrives at the door of the final boss, Loki, he is told that he cannot win without the power of a goddess, and is sent back to the first stage. On the second run, a chest opened while wearing gold armour holds the goddess and her weapon, the Psycho Cannon, and only with that can he enter Loki’s chamber. Retro Gamer summed up the whole series’ habit: beat the game and “you are sent away to obtain the Psycho Cannon weapon then return for some more”.
Fujiwara did not see this as cruelty. “We never thought that we were being cruel when we were making the series,” he said, “rather we were reacting to the desires of strong gamers to deliver titles that challenged their skills.”
The Mega Drive version
Sega converted the game for its new Mega Drive, and the programmer was Yuji Naka, who went on to program Sonic the Hedgehog. In a 2016 interview he remembered the shock of seeing Capcom’s data: Mega Drive cartridges at the time held 4 megabits, and the arcade program alone was bigger than that, before any graphics. The team compressed everything it could, got close to the arcade game and then ran out of room. Naka begged the company to add one more megabit, and Daimakaimura became, in his words, the only Mega Drive game with an odd-sized “5-megabit ROM”. He also said the arcade game’s slopes, which Arthur could walk up and down, gave him the grounding for the hills and loops of Sonic.
The cartridge went on sale in Japan in August 1989, and British importers were selling it within weeks. Computer and Video Games reviewed an import copy in October 1989 at £41.90 and gave it 96%. Paul Glancey admitted that the first few Mega Drive games had left him doubting whether the machine could compete with the PC Engine, “but those doubts are now gone”. His verdict: “A perfect arcade conversion, undoubtedly the best 16 Bit Sega title yet.”
U.S. Gold’s conversions
In Britain, U.S. Gold held the home computer rights. Computer and Video Games explained in February 1989 that when the company signed with Capcom it “secured the licence to convert the next ten Capcom titles”, good and bad alike. U.S. Gold gave Ghouls ’n Ghosts to Software Creations of Manchester, and in its advertisements the princess became “Princess Hus”.
On the Spectrum it cost £9.99 on cassette and £14.99 on disk, and CRASH made it a Smash at 92% in December 1989. The reviewers praised the “superbly smooth scrolling” and were irritated only by yellow sprites that vanished against yellow scenery and by being sent back to the beginning of the level after each death. Sinclair User’s “Blueprint” feature explained how the scrolling worked, and what it cost. Mike Follin’s software scroll kept the processor “uninterruptably tied up” for most of each two-frame game cycle, so music could only have been played at 25 updates a second. “Rather than have sub-standard music”, the team used three-channel sound effects during play and kept Tim Follin’s “high quality 50Hz music” for the menus. When CRASH asked its staff for their games of 1989, one reviewer, Richard, chose Ghouls ’n Ghosts as both best game and best coin-op conversion.
The Commodore 64 version was the triumph. ZZAP! gave it 96% and a Gold Medal in January 1990: “The soundtrack, and FX, are simply out of this world with some beautifully produced music urging you on.” The Amiga version followed a month later. ZZAP! found it “nowhere near as technically impressive” as the C64 game, but still “enormously playable”, with Tim Follin’s “three excellent, atmospheric in-game tunes plus a brilliant ‘folk rock’ title tune”. Amiga Format gave it 91%, found the graphics remarkably close to the arcade machine, and noted that Follin’s music used the “power LED off” trick, which switched off the Amiga’s audio filter, “to get the best quality sound possible from the machine”.
Other versions
Sega made a second version for the Master System, and there was a version for NEC’s SuperGrafx, the upgraded PC Engine; Retro Gamer notes that it made up a fifth of the SuperGrafx’s small library. Capcom’s own version for the Sharp X68000 home computer came out in 1994, six years after the arcade game. Sanglard’s study calls it a “perfect port” because its graphics are so faithful to the arcade board, with every enemy, level and weapon in place.
Arthur’s next outing was Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts on the Super Famicom in 1991.
Sources
- The Games Machine issue 13, December 1988, pp. 28–29, Robin Hogg, JAMMA show report: Ghouls ’n Ghosts at the Tokyo show.
- ACE issue 18, March 1989, p. 30: arcade round-up (Capcom, 30p; “great fun”).
- Computer and Video Games issue 87, January 1989, p. 127: arcade review.
- CRASH issue 64, May 1989, p. 63: arcade column, Strider review, comparing it with Ghouls ’n Ghosts and the new Capcom system.
- Retro Gamer issue 29, 2006, pp. 35–39, Sean Smith, series feature with Tokuro Fujiwara: 1988 and the second CPS1 release; the graphics, bosses and weather; vertical firing; the chests, gold armour, the magician, the duck and the old man; Fujiwara’s comment on the sequel; the Psycho Cannon and his remark on cruelty; the Mega Drive, Master System, SuperGrafx and X68000 versions; Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts.
- Retro Gamer Collection volume 5, 2011, p. 174: the SuperGrafx version as a fifth of the console’s library.
- Fabien Sanglard, The Book of CP-System (self-published), p. 33 (the CPS-1 games by year), pp. 96–97 (the graphics layers of the first stage and the rain drawn every fifth frame), pp. 212–214 (the Sharp X68000 version of 1994).
- “Ghouls’n Ghosts”, Sega Retro (web, secondary): the Mega Drive version by Sega R&D 2, Japanese release on 3 August 1989, the Master System version; the goddess, the Psycho Cannon and Loki’s chamber; the weapons and their charged attacks. https://segaretro.org/Ghouls%27n_Ghosts
- Masayuki Kibe, interview with Yuji Naka, Denfaminicogamer, 7 July 2016 (web, secondary; in Japanese): the 4-megabit cartridge, the extra megabit and the “5-megabit ROM”, the slopes. https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/megadrivecx/kibe2
- Retro Gamer issue 26, 2006, p. 25, Sonic Team profile: Naka’s Mega Drive conversion of Ghouls ’N Ghosts.
- Computer and Video Games issue 95, October 1989, pp. 116–117, Paul Glancey: Mega Drive import review (£41.90, 96%).
- Computer and Video Games issue 88, February 1989, p. 50: LED Storm review, on U.S. Gold’s deal for the next ten Capcom games.
- CRASH issue 69, October 1989, p. 26: the U.S. Gold version announced, programmed by Software Creations. Issue 71, December 1989, p. 7: U.S. Gold advertisement (formats, “Princess Hus”); p. 57: Spectrum review (92%, Smash); p. 51: price. Issue 72, January 1990, p. 19: the staff’s choices of 1989.
- Sinclair User issue 92, November 1989, “Blueprint”, from p. 86: the Spectrum version’s scrolling and music, and its credits (Mike Follin, Tim and Geoff Follin, Ben Jackson).
- ZZAP! issue 57, January 1990, pp. 16–17: Commodore 64 review (US Gold, £9.99 cassette, £14.99 disk; 96%). Issue 58, February 1990, p. 69: Amiga review.
- Amiga Format issue 7, February 1990, pp. 32–33, Maff Evans: Amiga review (91%; Tim Follin and the “power LED off” trick).