Konami’s Gradius, released the same year, gave the player a sleek spaceship. TwinBee gave two players a pair of cartoon ships with arms, and filled the sky with clouds that had bells hidden inside them. Shooting a bell does not destroy it. It knocks the bell upwards and changes its colour, and the colour decides what the ship gets when it catches the bell. Keep a bell in the air with careful shots and you can choose your power-up.
Bright, cheerful shooters of this kind came to be called “cute ’em ups”. When Sega’s designer Yoji Ishii set out to make Fantasy Zone the following year, he named TwinBee, alongside Xevious and Gradius, as one of the games Sega’s new shooter had to stand up to.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Konami.
- Released: arcade, 1985. Konami converted it for the Famicom and the MSX in 1986.
- Players: one or two at once.
- Sequels: Moero TwinBee (1986), sold on the NES in the West as Stinger; TwinBee 3 (1989); Detana!! TwinBee (1991) and Pop’n TwinBee (1993), among others.
Bells
The bells come out of the clouds, and Retro summed up the system: “Shooting the game’s many Bells would make them change colour and provided the player with different power ups.” Two modern guides agree on what the colours mean in the first game:
| Bell | Effect |
|---|---|
| Yellow | bonus points |
| White | twin shot |
| Blue | speed up |
| Green | mirror-image copies of the ship (“options”) |
| Red | a protective barrier |
A bell starts yellow, and Hardcore Gaming 101 warns that “it takes a lot of hits in order for the bells to color cycle into something useful”. Every shot spent juggling a bell is a shot not spent on the enemies.
Ground, arms and ambulances
The ship has two weapons: one button shoots at things in the air, the other drops bombs on things on the ground. Bombed ground targets can leave fruit for extra points or, now and then, a star that destroys every enemy on the screen.
The arms matter. A bullet that clips the side of the ship knocks off an arm instead of costing a life, and a ship without its arms can no longer drop bombs. Lose both and a small ambulance flies on to the screen to patch the ship up.
Two at once
The first player flies TwinBee and the second WinBee, and the two ships can work together. Fly them side by side and they join hands for a single, more powerful shot; let one push the other and they fire a spread.
At home, and abroad
Konami’s Famicom and MSX versions followed in 1986. On the MSX, Retro Gamer has described one of Konami’s tricks with the computer’s two cartridge slots: plug in both Gradius and TwinBee, and Gradius was played with the TwinBee ship, collecting bells in place of its usual power-ups.
The MSX version travelled further than Konami’s own markets. In October 1986 the Brazilian magazine Micro Sistemas reported that Gradiente, maker of the Expert MSX, had launched a new range of game cartridges that included Twin Bee, alongside Goonies, Road Fighter and Knightmare.
The series
The second game, Moero TwinBee, reached the NES in North America as Stinger. Wireframe noted that it “added horizontal scrolling levels and even a three-player mode”. TwinBee 3: Poko Poko Daimaō (1989) stayed in Japan, and Wireframe credits it with the improvements that “paved the way for better-known titles like Detana!! TwinBee and Pop’n TwinBee”.
Detana!! TwinBee (1991) returned to the arcades with what Retro called “prettier visuals and even more manic gameplay”. Retro Gamer lists it among the early games of Koji Igarashi, who programmed a TwinBee game for the PC Engine before becoming assistant director of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Pop’n TwinBee (1993) brought the series to the Super Nintendo, and Super Play made it a cover review in June 1993.
The ship turned up in other Konami games too, including the Famicom character crossover Konami Wai Wai World, and the series has been gathered up for later machines: Retro Gamer reported in 2007 that TwinBee Portable for the PSP would collect several TwinBee games.
Sources
- Retro, volume 2 (Imagine Publishing, 2008): vertical shooters feature (Twin Bee, 1985, two players and the bells; Detana!! Twin Bee).
- Steve Jarratt and Damien McFerran, SEGA Master System: a visual compendium (Bitmap Books, 2019), p. 25: Yoji Ishii on the games Fantasy Zone had to compete with.
- Micro Sistemas (Brazil) no. 61, October 1986: Gradiente’s MSX game cartridges, Twin Bee among them.
- Retro Gamer issue 15, 2005: the MSX’s two cartridge slots and the Gradius/TwinBee combination. Issue 16, 2005: Konami Wai Wai World. Issue 35, 2007: TwinBee Portable; Koji Igarashi’s PC Engine TwinBee and his early games.
- Super Play issue 8, June 1993: Pop’n TwinBee review.
- Wireframe issue 62, April 2022, “Konami 1980s Classics”: the first TwinBee, Stinger and TwinBee 3.
- Hardcore Gaming 101, “TwinBee” (web, secondary): the bell colours, ground targets, the arms and the ambulance, the two-player attacks, the home versions. http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/twinbee/
- Wikipedia, “TwinBee (video game)” (web, secondary): the bells hidden in clouds, the bell colours, TwinBee and WinBee, the air and ground buttons, the arms, the two-player attacks, the Famicom and MSX release dates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TwinBee_(video_game)