Gunstar Heroes was Treasure’s first release: a 1993 run-and-gun shooter that could turn from a platform battle into a mine-cart chase, a board game or a space shoot-’em-up. Producer Masato Maegawa described its guiding idea as “anything goes”. The team had left Konami to make its own games, and packed this one with different ways to move and fight.
Sega published it for the Mega Drive in September 1993. It supports one player or two playing together.
Red, Blue and the trigger
The Gunstar twins must recover four gems and stop the reactivation of Golden Silver, a robot that threatens their world. Each hero has a vitality counter rather than dying from a single hit. Close combat matters too: enemies can be grabbed and thrown, and the twins have sliding and jumping attacks.
The shooting choice changes how movement feels. Free shot lets the hero run while firing. Fixed shot keeps him in place while he fires and aims. The latter is useful when an enemy needs sustained fire, but the player has to release the trigger to move out of danger.
Two players can throw one another without losing vitality. There is also a cost to returning after defeat: the surviving twin gives up half his remaining vitality so his partner can rejoin. Cooperation therefore involves more than putting twice as many shots on screen.
Four weapons, ten combinations
Force fires rapid shots, Lightning sends a beam through enemies, Chaser seeks targets and Fire works at close range. A player can hold two weapons and use either separately or combine them. Pairing a weapon with another of the same type works too. The four single weapons and ten pairs give fourteen options.
For example, Lightning and Chaser produce a homing beam, while Lightning and Fire make a short sabre. Maegawa told Retro Gamer that the combinations were intended to let players find different ways through each stage. The system gives players alternatives to a simple sequence of progressively stronger guns.
Stages that change the rules
The first four stages can be tackled in any order. In the Underground Mine, the twins ride carts along tracks on both floor and ceiling. Jumping between them changes which surface counts as the ground. Black’s Dice Palace turns progress into a board game: the die sends the player to fights, item rooms and setbacks. Later, the twins pilot a spacecraft through a horizontally scrolling stage.
Green’s Seven Force is a boss built around changing shapes. Retro Gamer’s feature shows forms including a gun, a bird, a humanoid machine and a tiger. Maegawa named it as his favourite boss and singled out its seven transformations.
Making it move
Maegawa described a concrete visual compromise. The artists initially used one 16-colour palette for backgrounds, then changed to two palettes because he found the result too sparse. That is his account of the artwork’s palette allocation, rather than a claim that the machine could display only sixteen colours.
Retro Gamer praised the apparent rotation and scaling of the graphics and the action’s steadiness under crowded conditions. The composer credited as Non and sound-effects creator Murata worked after the game had taken shape, according to Maegawa, so they could fit the sound to its changing pace.
A short game, then a long afterlife
Edge’s first issue praised the speed, smooth scrolling and two-player action, but gave the game six out of ten. Its verdict was that it was “great while it lasts, but it doesn’t last long”. The later Retro Gamer feature likewise described a game that a skilled player could finish in about an hour, while admiring the variety within it.
M2 converted it to Game Gear, released in Japan in March 1995. The handheld version omitted the Dice Palace and replaced the mine carts with flying packs. Treasure followed with Gunstar Super Heroes for the Game Boy Advance in 2005. The Mega Drive original appeared in the PlayStation 2 Treasure Box collection and on Wii Virtual Console in 2006. A stereoscopic Nintendo 3DS version followed in 2015, and Sega included it in the Mega Drive Mini in 2019.
Sources
- Sega, Gunstar Heroes, Genesis instruction manual, 1993, pp. 4–13: story, movement, vitality, weapons, stage selection and cooperative play.
- Edge issue 1, October 1993, “Testscreen: Gunstar Heroes”; release schedule in the same issue: contemporary mechanics, reception and September release.
- Jonti Davies, “The Making of Gunstar Heroes”, Retro Gamer issue 50, 2008, pp. 56–61: interview with Masato Maegawa; Treasure’s debut, design, stage descriptions, backgrounds, sound and subsequent versions.
- Sega, Mega Drive Mini: Gunstar Heroes: 10 September 1993 Japanese release and inclusion in the Mini (publisher record).
- Sega Forever, Game Gear anniversary post, 31 March 2021: M2’s Japan-only conversion (publisher record).
- Sega Retro, “Gunstar Heroes”: March 1995 Game Gear release (web, secondary).
- Nintendo, 3D Gunstar Heroes: 20 August 2015 European release (publisher record).