Most shooting games of the early 1980s gave the player one thing to shoot at. Xevious gave two. The player’s craft, the Solvalou, flies up the screen over forests, rivers, roads and desert, and it carries two weapons on two buttons: a Zapper for aircraft and a Blaster that drops bombs on whatever is on the ground, aimed with a sight that moves ahead of the ship. Under the shooting sits a world with a story, a made-up language and secrets. Namco released it in Japan early in 1983, Atari built it for American arcades, and in Japan it became one of the games players studied, wrote about and argued over.
Fast facts
- Developer: Namco; designed by Masanobu Endo.
- Arcade release: Japan, early 1983 (Namco’s list says February; a Japanese anniversary feature gives 29 January). The cabinet carries a 1982 copyright date.
- In America: manufactured by Atari under licence from Namco, advertised from spring 1983.
- Weapons: Zapper (air) and Blaster (ground), on separate buttons.
- Structure: 16 areas that loop back to the start.
- Famicom version: 1984; 1.5 million copies according to David Sheff and Edge.
- British home versions: U.S. Gold, 1986–87, converted by Probe Software.
- CRASH (Spectrum): 64%, February 1987.
Two targets at once
Videogaming Illustrated described the controls to American players in June 1983: a Zapper button “to destroy airborne targets and a Blaster button for ground targets”. The bombs land some distance ahead, where a sight in front of the ship shows, so a gun emplacement has to be lined up before the ship reaches it; when the crosshairs are over a ground target, JoyStik explained, the sight “will glow bright red”. JoyStik also told its readers that ground targets “are worth much more than air targets”, which pushed good players to do both jobs at once. Its reviewer thought the graphics “as good as Zaxxon’s or Tron’s, but the game play is much better”.
The enemies did not fly in the fixed formations of earlier shooters. Retro Gamer’s Stuart Campbell described them in 2007 as “intelligent individual craft, reluctant to get in front of your guns and prepared to retreat, veer off to the side or even sneak past you then attack from behind”. Atari’s advertisements named some of them: “BACULA resistor shields, ZOSHI Death squads, GROBDA tanks, the ANDOR GENESIS mother ship”. The Bacura, as the name is usually spelled, cannot be destroyed; Electronic Games warned that these “flying, square-shaped mirrors deflect the Sovalou’s gunfire, and can down the superjet with a collision”. The Andor Genesis is a huge flying fortress; U.S. Gold’s advertisements for the home versions explained that “a direct hit to her central reactor will disable her”.
A world under the game
Xevious has a plot that almost nobody reading the cabinet would have found. Campbell summarised it: set in 2012 around the Nazca lines of southern Peru, it tells of an ancient human race returning to reclaim the Earth under the control of a supercomputer called GAMP. Nazca figures are drawn into the landscape of one of its areas. Endo gave the world an invented language, in which the name “Solvalou” has a meaning, GAME Watch noted in 2023, and he later wrote a novel set there.
The game also hid things. The same red glow over an apparently empty patch of ground meant, in JoyStik’s words, “there must be an invisible target under them”: bomb it and a hidden structure, known in Japan as a Sol, rises out of the ground, and it “will still be there the next time you come around”. A hidden special flag was the other famous secret. Electronic Games reported in September 1983 that Xevious was “rumored to have a ‘secret ending’ that only the best arcaders will get to witness”. Rumours like that sent players back to the machine to test them.
The fanzine
In Japan the hunt for secrets was carried on in print. Satoshi Tajiri, then a teenager, wrote and stapled together a fanzine called Game Freak, and his best seller was a special issue on Xevious. “We sold 10,000 copies,” he told TIME in 1999. The fanzine brought him the collaborators with whom he later founded Game Freak, the company that made Pokémon. In 2016 Endo, Tajiri and the Pokémon artist Ken Sugimori sat down together to talk about Xevious for the Japanese site Denfaminico Gamer.
Atari’s Xevious
In America the machine arrived under Atari’s name. Atari’s advertisements, which ran from April 1983, asked “Are you hot enough?”, offered a free Atari 2600 in a prize draw, and ended with the small print: “Xevious is engineered and designed by Namco Ltd. Manufactured under license by Atari, Inc.” Electronic Games reviewed it in September 1983 and thought that “though the play-mechanic is familiar, Xevious is anything but dated”, with “pleasant, realistic landscape graphics” and “enough variety here to dazzle even the most jaded joysticker”.
It earned well. In the Play Meter operators’ poll that Video Games printed in September 1983, Xevious was fourth, behind Atari’s other Namco licence, Pole Position, Centuri’s Time Pilot and Atari’s Millipede. The best players found the game’s limit quickly. The Twin Galaxies record published in June 1983 was 230,790 points; by the September issue it stood at 9,999,990, marked “Cannot be broken”. That is the highest score the display can show, and Campbell reported that a player who kept looping past it made the game crash.
At home
Namco released Xevious on the Famicom in 1984, as one of Nintendo’s first licensees. David Sheff and Edge both report that it sold 1.5 million copies and paid for a new Namco office block, nicknamed the Xevious Building; a Japanese retrospective in 2023 gave a lower figure of 1.27 million. In America the NES version was retitled Xevious: The Avenger. Atari produced a version for its 7800 console, which Retro Gamer later judged “excellent”, with graphics and sound a little short of the arcade but the gameplay “untarnished”. Namco also went on to make Super Xevious, a harder arcade update of 1984, and, for small Japanese home computers that could not run the original, Tiny Xevious.
British players got U.S. Gold’s versions at the end of 1986, advertised as another classic Atari coin-op for the Commodore 64, Spectrum and Amstrad. The Spectrum version, by Probe Software, drew the play area in green and black. CRASH gave it 64% in February 1987; one reviewer, who had liked the arcade game, called the conversion “a boring shoot ’em up that’s instantly forgettable”. Sinclair User was kinder that month, calling it “a better than average shoot ’em up” and, “as a conversion”, “pretty good”. Zzap!64 found the Commodore version “quite playable, but it’s all so slow and reluctant to do anything exciting”. Campbell’s guide, twenty years later, called the Spectrum, C64 and Amstrad versions “barely recognisable as the same game”.
Later
Namco kept returning to the game. Sequels and remakes include Xevious: Fardraut Saga for the MSX2 and Xevious 3D/G in the arcades, and the original has appeared on compilations from Namco Museum onwards; Retro Gamer noted in 2007 that it was hidden as a bonus in Star Fox Assault on the GameCube. Campbell’s verdict was that, outside Japan, “the mention of Xevious to the average gamer under the age of 30 will be met with a blank look”, while in Japan it is “celebrated as a true classic”.
Sources
- Stuart Campbell, Xevious guide, Retro Gamer issue 34, 2007, from p. 63: the pronunciation, Endo, the plot and GAMP, the Nazca lines, the enemies’ behaviour, the 9,999,990 display limit, the home versions, Xevious: The Avenger, Tiny Xevious, Super Xevious, Fardraut Saga and 3D/G.
- Retro Gamer issue 14, 2005: the Atari 7800 version; Star Fox Assault.
- Videogaming Illustrated, June 1983, p. 10: the Zapper and Blaster buttons.
- JoyStik vol. 1 no. 6, July 1983, pp. 33–35: Xevious strategy (the bomb-sight, ground targets, the hidden targets, the comparison with Zaxxon and Tron).
- Atari advertisement, Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 15, May 1983, and Video Games vol. 1 nos. 8 and 9, May and June 1983: the enemies, the prize draw and the licence notice. An earlier Atari advertisement appears in Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 14, April 1983.
- Tracie Forman, coin-op reviews, Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 7, September 1983, pp. 93–96: Xevious (Atari).
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 12, September 1983, pp. 81–82: Play Meter top earning arcade games and the Twin Galaxies high scores. Video Games vol. 1 no. 9, June 1983, pp. 81–82: high scores.
- “The Ultimate Game Freak”, TIME Asia, 22 November 1999 (web, secondary): Tajiri’s Xevious issue, “We sold 10,000 copies”. https://time.com/archive/6951818/the-ultimate-game-freak/
- “「ゼビウス」がなければ「ポケモン」は生まれなかった！？”, Denfaminico Gamer, 8 February 2016 (web, secondary): conversation between Masanobu Endo, Satoshi Tajiri and Ken Sugimori. https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/projectbook/xevious
- Shigihara Moriyuki, Xevious 40th anniversary feature, GAME Watch, 29 January 2023 (web, secondary): the release date, Endo’s role, the 16 areas, the Nazca figures, the invented language, the Sol and the special flag, the Famicom version’s 1.27 million sales, Endo’s novel. https://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/kikaku/1473560.html
- David Sheff, Game Over (GamePress edition, 1999), p. 61, and Edge issue 8, May 1994, pp. 54–61: the Famicom version’s 1.5 million sales and the Xevious Building; Namco’s release list.
- U.S. Gold advertisements, Zzap!64 issues 19 and 20, November and December 1986.
- CRASH issue 37, February 1987, pp. 104–105: Spectrum review (U.S. Gold, author Probe Software), 64%.
- Sinclair User issue 59, February 1987, p. 23: Spectrum review.
- Zzap!64 issue 22, February 1987, p. 106: Commodore 64 review.