In most shooting games the player steers. In a rail shooter the game does the steering. The camera travels along a route the designers laid down in advance, like a fairground ride on its track, and the player’s whole job is to aim and fire at whatever the route brings into view. Giving up that freedom bought something in return. Because the designers knew exactly where the player would be at every moment, they could stage each attack like a scene in a film: a gunman leaping from behind a door, a battle cruiser sliding overhead, a dragon banking away from the camera.
The label came later than the games. Magazines of the 1990s described games whose ship “flies on rails”, and by the 2000s “on-rail shooter” had become a genre name. It covers two families that grew up side by side: flying games that race into the screen, and light-gun games that walk the player through a building or a battlefield.
Fast facts
- Defining trait: the game moves the player along a fixed route; the player aims and fires.
- Early example: Sega’s Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom (1982).
- Into the screen: Space Harrier (1985), After Burner (1987), Starblade (1991), Star Fox (1993), Panzer Dragoon (1995), Rez (2001).
- With a gun: Operation Wolf (1987), Virtua Cop (1994), Time Crisis (1995), The House of the Dead (1997).
- Later homes: the Wii’s pointer in the late 2000s; virtual reality with Rez Infinite (2016).
Flying into the screen
Retro Gamer’s history of the shoot ’em up traces the “on-rail shooter” back to Sega’s Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom, and describes the type as pseudo-3D or 3D games in which a lone fighter flies “into the screen” and mows down “wave after wave of enemies”. Planet of Zoom reached American arcades late in 1982 and scaled its sprites to make objects rush towards the player. Electronic Games called it “the most visually gripping new coin-op this season” in April 1983, and singled out its “trench” scene, in which the player threads a ship through a narrow valley dodging obstacles.
Sega took the idea much further with Yu Suzuki’s Space Harrier in 1985, which sent a jet-propelled hero racing over a chequered plain at monsters flying out of the screen, drawn by sprite scaling hardware. Suzuki’s After Burner (1987) put the player behind an F-14 flying into the screen, in deluxe cabinets that rolled with the plane.
Polygons came next. Namco’s Starblade, which Edge called the coin-op “taking pride of place in every arcade” in late 1991, drew its enemies in real time over backgrounds stored on a LaserDisc. “Your ship flies on rails throughout the game,” Edge explained; the player controls only the gunsight. Edge also reported that Nintendo’s team on Star Fox had apparently taken inspiration from it. Star Fox limited the player’s movement “to more or less straight ahead”, as Argonaut’s Jez San put it, to ease newcomers into 3D.
When Edge previewed Sega’s Panzer Dragoon for the Saturn in 1995, it spelt out the bargain these games made. It looked like free flight, but “instead of having complete control of the dragon, you fly through the level environments ‘on rails’. In effect, you play the dragon’s ‘gunner’.” The magazine compared it with Space Harrier: both were “simple 3D into-the-screen shoot ’em ups”. Six years later Rez used the same structure for a game in which every lock-on added a sound to the music.
Light guns on rails
The other family began with the light gun. Early gun games such as Nintendo’s Duck Hunt were shooting galleries: the targets moved and the player stood still. Taito’s Operation Wolf (1987) sent the player on a journey instead. It reached British arcades at the end of 1987, and Sinclair User’s coin-op column in January 1988 described the machine gun “perched on the outside of the cabinet”, with a built-in launcher for grenades, and six scenes that took the player through jungle, villages and a concentration camp to an airport, with hostages and civilians who must not be shot. The reviewer thought it “extremely fast and addictive”, and also “very violent and tasteless”.
Polygons changed this family too. Sega AM2’s Virtua Cop (1994) moved the camera through 3D warehouses and offices, with gangsters who reacted to where they were hit. Namco answered with Time Crisis (1995), whose foot pedal let the player duck behind cover while a clock pushed them back out. Sega’s The House of the Dead, which Computer and Video Games called “a mix of Resident Evil meets Virtua Cop” when it appeared at Japan’s AOU show in early 1997, swapped gangsters for zombies and scientists to rescue. Its routes branched, and unlike Virtua Cop 2’s fixed junctions they changed with the player’s progress, so experts could reach routes that beginners never saw.
After the CRT
Light guns needed a cathode-ray tube television, and flat screens stopped them working (the light gun entry explains why). The Wii gave the genre a second life. Its remote needs no picture to time: Edge explained in 2006 that the “misleadingly-named sensor bar” on the television is a row of infrared emitters, seen by a sensor in the end of the remote when it points at them. Nintendo’s Wii Zapper was, as Retro Gamer put it in 2008, “not actually a lightgun” but a plastic cradle for the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, and it had “led to a renaissance of lightgun shooters on the Wii”, including the first home version of Sega’s Ghost Squad and a two-game House of the Dead 2 & 3 collection. Sega told the magazine that it intended all its future light-gun releases to be on the Wii. Capcom’s Resident Evil spin-offs and Visceral Games’ Dead Space Extraction followed; Edge called the latter “the Citizen Kane of on-rail gun games” in 2009.
Virtual reality gave the flying branch a new home. Rez returned in 2016 as Rez Infinite, played inside a VR headset.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 42, 2007, p. 52, “The Complete Guide to Shoot-’em-ups”: Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom and the on-rail shooter; into-the-screen games from Space Harrier to Rez.
- Electronic Games, April 1983, p. 49: Buck Rogers, Planet of Zoom in the arcades.
- Sega Retro, “Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom” (web, secondary): November 1982 US arcade release; sprite scaling. https://segaretro.org/Buck_Rogers:_Planet_of_Zoom
- Edge issue 16, January 1995, p. 38: Starblade prescreen (the 1991 coin-op, LaserDisc backgrounds, “flies on rails”, the Star Fox team’s inspiration).
- Edge issue 19, April 1995, p. 29: Panzer Dragoon prescreen (“on rails”, the dragon’s gunner, the Space Harrier comparison).
- Commodore User, November 1987, p. 120: Operation Wolf “on the point of being launched here”.
- Sinclair User issue 70, January 1988, p. 71: Operation Wolf, coin-op of the month.
- Computer and Video Games issue 186, May 1997, p. 84: The House of the Dead at the AOU show (Model 2, branching routes, rescuing scientists).
- Edge, Christmas 2006 edition (issue 170), p. 13: the Wii’s sensor bar and remote.
- Retro Gamer issue 50, 2008, pp. 32–34: The House of the Dead feature (the Wii Zapper, the Wii’s light-gun revival, Sega’s plans).
- Edge, Christmas 2009 edition (issue 209), p. 103: Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles review, with Dead Space Extraction as “the Citizen Kane of on-rail gun games”.
- For Space Harrier, After Burner, Star Fox, Rez, Virtua Cop, Time Crisis and the light gun, see those entries and their sources.