Shoot 'em Up | Code Like It's 198x

A shoot ’em up puts the player in charge of a ship, a plane or a lone figure, fills the screen with enemies that shoot back, and asks them to survive. The name was in use by June 1979, when Radio Shack advertised a TRS-80 program called Flying Saucers as “A Shoot ’em Up Game for the Whole Family”. By March 1983 a British reviewer could call it “the ubiquitous ’shoot-‘em-up’”. In between, the genre had gone from one screen of marching aliens to whole planets scrolling past, and it kept changing for the next forty years. On British home computers it became the everyday game; in Japan it turned into games whose screens are so full of enemy fire that they are known as danmaku shooters, or in English “bullet hell”.

Fast facts

Starting point: Space Invaders (Taito, 1978), whose aliens fired back.
Scrolling: Scramble (Konami) and Defender (Williams), both 1981, flew sideways over a landscape; Xevious (Namco, 1983) scrolled up the screen.
Power-ups: Gradius (1985) let the player choose upgrades from a gauge; R-Type (1987) added the detachable Force.
British landmarks: Uridium on the Commodore 64 (1986) and Sensible Software’s Shoot ’Em Up Construction Kit (1987).
Bullet hell: from Toaplan’s Batsugun (1993) to Cave’s DonPachi (1995) and DoDonPachi (1997).
Spelling: never settled. Shoot ’em up, shoot-em-up and shoot-’em-up all appear in the period press.

Aliens that fire back

Shooting at targets on a screen was older than Space Invaders. Retro Gamer noted in 2007 that purists would name Spacewar! as the genre’s beginning, the space duel written by hackers at MIT “back in 1961-62 for a DEC PDP-1”, as David Ahl put it in 1978. What Tomohiro Nishikado changed in 1978 was the targets. “Up until Space Invaders, shooting games didn’t feature enemies that would attack the player,” he told Retro Gamer. His invaders marched down the screen and dropped bombs, and they sped up as their numbers fell. The game made the Taito name, and in Retro Gamer’s words it “paved the way for hundreds of clones”.

Namco answered in 1979 with Galaxian, which kept the formation but sent aliens swooping out of it at the player. Nishikado remembered seeing it: “I remember thinking Space Invaders had lost.” The formation games that followed, from Galaga on, kept that shape: one screen, the player’s ship along the bottom, the enemy above.

The screen starts to move

In 1981 two games let the player fly over a landscape instead of waiting at the bottom of one screen. Konami’s Scramble, sold in America by Stern, sent a ship through five defence systems over hills, caves and a city to a base at the end. It had to bomb fuel tanks to stay in the air: “if you run out of fuel, you crash,” Electronic Games warned. By May 1982 the magazine called it “probably the single most influential wargame in today’s commercial arcade arsenal” and “one of many horizontally-scrolling shoot-out contests”.

Williams’s Defender, Eugene Jarvis’s first video game, scrolled a planet left and right under the player’s ship, with a scanner strip showing the whole world at once and humanoids on the ground to rescue. Jarvis and Larry DeMar followed it with Robotron: 2084 (1982), which went the other way: one crowded screen, a joystick to move and a second to fire in any direction, the ancestor of today’s twin-stick shooters.

Namco’s Xevious (released early in 1983, with a 1982 copyright on the screen) scrolled vertically over forests, rivers and deserts and split the fighting in two. Atari, which sold it in America, explained the controls in 1983: a Zapper button “to destroy airborne targets and a Blaster button for ground targets”. A bomb-sight moving ahead of the ship showed where each bomb would land, and Joystik advised players that ground targets “are worth much more than air targets”. Flying and shooting now had to be done on two levels at once.

Power-ups and memory

By the mid-1980s arcade shoot ’em ups were built around what the ship could become. Konami’s Gradius (1985), sold in Europe as Nemesis, dropped capsules that moved a highlight along a gauge of upgrades at the bottom of the screen: speed, missiles, a laser, extra guns called Options. The player chose when to spend them, and losing a life took everything away. CRASH spelled out the rule: “When a ship is lost all the features that it has gathered have to be collected once again.”

Irem’s R-Type (1987) gave the player a pod called the Force that nothing could destroy. It could be fixed to either end of the ship, fired off across the screen and called back, and much of the game’s strategy comes from where the Force is at any moment. CRASH’s arcade reviewer found it “undoubtedly the most impressive coin-op of the lot” in October 1987, with “almost always a crowd round the cabinet”.

These were games of learning as much as reflexes. Levels were the same every time, so a player who had seen a wave before knew where it would come from. Reviewing Uridium in 1986, ZZAP!64’s Gary Liddon wrote that “knowing the maps of the various Dreadnoughts is essential to get anywhere of note”.

The British home-computer shoot ’em up

On British home computers the shoot ’em up was the everyday game. An Imagine advertisement of January 1983 sold Arcadia for the Spectrum and VIC-20 as “the fastest, meanest, most addictive shoot ’em up game you’ve ever desired”. Arcade clones filled the early catalogues, Galaxians and Defender copies among them. The better programmers soon made their own. Jeff Minter turned a Centipede-style idea into Gridrunner (1982) for the unexpanded VIC-20, and Andrew Braybrook described Uridium (1986) to ZZAP!64 as “Defender from another point of view”, looking down on the hulls of alien dreadnoughts. He wanted a Commodore 64 game that “looks like it should BE in an arcade”, and it scrolled at a full 50 frames a second. When CRASH’s readers voted on the games of 1986, “Best Shoot ’Em Up” was a category of its own, and the Spectrum Uridium won it.

Arcade licences sold on the name of the coin-op, and the conversions were judged against it (see arcade conversion). The licences were fought over too. In autumn 1988 Activision, which held R-Type, objected to Katakis, a German shooter ZZAP!64 thought “very much in the R-Type mould”, and U.S. Gold withdrew it.

At the end of 1987 Sensible Software and Outlaw Productions went further and sold the genre as a kit. The Shoot ‘Em Up Construction Kit for the Commodore 64, £14.95 on cassette and £19.95 on disk, let “a person with absolutely no knowledge of BASIC or machine code” design sprites, draw a scrolling map, set the enemies’ attack waves and save the result as a game that ran on its own. ZZAP!64 told its readers they could now design their own Sizzler, the magazine’s award for its best-rated games. On the 16-bit machines the Bitmap Brothers’ Xenon 2 (1989), with its weapon shop, was, in ZZAP!’s words, “quite simply the definitive Amiga shoot-’em-up” (see its entry for the review).

Bullet hell

By the mid-1990s the arcades belonged to fighting games, driving games and gun games, and Retro Gamer has described how the shoot ’em up “no longer dominated the arcades as they once did”. In Japan it changed shape instead. Retro Gamer dates the start of the danmaku, or “bullet hell”, shooter to Toaplan’s Batsugun in 1993, the company’s last arcade shooter. The screen filled with enemy fire, but the player’s ship had a tiny hit box, the area that counts as a hit. “The old way of doing things, when a bullet touching your ship in any way meant death, doesn’t work here,” James Greenhalgh of Shmups.com explained to Retro Gamer, so designers shrank the hit boxes of the ship and of the bullets themselves. Some games, Psyvariar 2 among them, then scored the player for “grazing” bullets.

Cave, whose chief programmer Tsuneki Ikeda had worked on Batsugun, carried the style on with DonPachi (1995), DoDonPachi (1997), ESP Ra.De. (1998) and a long line of successors. Treasure took a more measured path with Radiant Silvergun (1998) and Ikaruga, released for the Dreamcast in September 2002, eighteen months after Sega had stopped making the console. Retro Gamer noted that both are generally considered “methodical shooters”, though they share many qualities with the danmaku games.

Made at home

The genre also passed to people working alone. In Japan, dōjin (self-published) games are sold at events such as Comiket, the Tokyo fan-publishing fair, and some of the best known of them are shoot ’em ups. Jun’ya Ōta, who calls himself ZUN and his one-person studio Team Shanghai Alice, writes the programs, graphics, story and music of the Touhou Project games himself. The series began on the NEC PC-98 in 1997 and moved to Windows with Embodiment of Scarlet Devil in 2002; by 2025 there were twenty numbered games. When Edge surveyed free and homebrew shooters in October 2004, ZUN’s Perfect Cherry Blossom was on its list alongside Kenta Cho’s rRootage and the Japanese Cho Ren Sha 68k. The magazine’s argument was that commercial shooters were becoming insular, playable only by experts, and that home programmers were keeping the genre open.

Downloadable games gave the shoot ’em up a new market. Retro Gamer reported in 2007 that the Xbox 360 offered Galaga, Defender, Scramble and Geometry Wars, while Nintendo’s Virtual Console had Xevious and PC Engine shooters: the genre had “found a new home” with players who wanted “quick blasts to fit in between sessions of Gears Of War”. Geometry Wars is a twin-stick shooter in the line of Robotron.

Sources

David H. Ahl (ed.), BASIC Computer Games: Microcomputer Edition (Creative Computing / Workman, 1978), “Spacewar”: MIT, 1961–62, the PDP-1.
Radio Shack, TRS-80 Microcomputer Newsletter, June 1979, p. 4: advertisement for Flying Saucers, “A Shoot ’em Up Game for the Whole Family”.
The Computer & Video Games Book of Reviews, supplement to Computer & Video Games issue 17, March 1983, p. 10: “As well as the ubiquitous ’shoot-‘em-up’”.
Computer & Video Games issue 15, January 1983, p. 115, and Your Computer, January 1983, p. 148: Imagine advertisement for Arcadia.
Retro Gamer Collection, volume 4 (2010), pp. 247–251, “The Making of: Space Invaders”: Nishikado on enemies that fire back and on Galaxian.
Retro Gamer issue 42, 2007, pp. 48–55, “The Complete Guide to Shoot-’em-ups”: Spacewar! and Space Invaders; Scramble and its fuel; Xevious; Batsugun and danmaku; hit boxes and grazing (James Greenhalgh interview); the genre’s decline in the arcades; Radiant Silvergun and Ikaruga; downloadable versions on Xbox 360 and Virtual Console.
Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 2, March 1982, p. 64: Scramble strategy guide (the five defence systems, fuel). Vol. 1 no. 3, May 1982, p. 40: Scramble as “the single most influential wargame”.
Videogaming Illustrated, June 1983, p. 10: Atari’s Xevious, the Zapper and Blaster buttons.
Joystik vol. 1 no. 6, July 1983, p. 36: Xevious strategy (the bomb-sight, ground targets).
CRASH issue 45, October 1987, pp. 135–136: arcade report on R-Type. ZZAP!64 issue 43, November 1988, p. 11: Katakis withdrawn. CRASH issue 38, March 1987, p. 34: readers’ awards for 1986. See the R-Type, Gradius and Uridium entries for the full citations, including CRASH’s Nemesis review.
ZZAP!64 issue 11, March 1986: Uridium interview and review. Issue 9, Christmas 1985: “Defender from another point of view”.
ZZAP!64 issue 32, December 1987, pp. 28–29: Shoot ’Em Up Construction Kit review (Outlaw Productions, Sensible Software, prices).
Retro Gamer: The Ultimate Retro Companion, volume 2 (Imagine Publishing, 2008), pp. 60–62: Saturn shooters (Batsugun as Toaplan’s last arcade shooter; Tsuneki Ikeda; DonPachi and DoDonPachi).
Edge issue 141, October 2004: feature on homebrew and freeware shooters (Perfect Cherry Blossom, rRootage, Cho Ren Sha 68k).
MAME source code (web, secondary), src/mame/galaxian/galaxian.cpp, src/mame/namco/galaga.cpp, src/mame/toaplan/batsugun.cpp and src/mame/atlus/cave.cpp: dates of Scramble (1981), Xevious (its 1982 copyright year; Namco dates the release to 1983), Batsugun (1993), DonPachi (1995), DoDonPachi (1997) and ESP Ra.De. (1998). https://github.com/mamedev/mame
“Touhou Project” and “Embodiment of Scarlet Devil”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): ZUN and Team Shanghai Alice, the PC-98 and Windows games and their Comiket release dates, the twentieth game in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touhou_Project
Edge issue 8, May 1994, p. 59, Namco feature: Namco’s list of arcade releases (“Feb ’83 Xevious”).