Normally, Sega’s GIGO Center in Ikebukuro, north west of Tokyo, is just a really big arcade. Earlier this year, however, it hosted the 3 Big Shooting Festa and became the war room for a tiny section of the Japanese game industry. The enemy? The current ideological trend of ‘making games for the west’. The symbol for this doomed revolution? A lone, pixellated spaceship.

Recent years have seen a huge number of shooter remakes, plus repackaging and some toe-dipping into the possibilities of download services, from an increasingly embattled group of small specialist developers. The 3 Big Shooting Festa served to illustrate that the genre still has its own big names and, more importantly, ongoing releases. Though largely down to a coincidence of delays and scheduling, the event celebrated the release of three additions to some classic series: the Fantasy Zone Complete Collection and Thunder Force VI on PS2, plus Raiden IV on Xbox 360.

Like any niche, shooters have a fanatical coterie of fans that obsess over the details, and it’s this passion that saw well over 200 people cramming onto the fourth floor of GIGO to listen to each title’s developers talk. This floor is usually reserved for Banpresto’s Senjo No Kizuna, the Gundam game that places you in a closed ‘POD’ cabinet, but to celebrate the occasion Sega had installed a line of freeplay cabinets featuring the best of Thunder Force, Raiden and Fantasy Zone, as well as some other local favourites.

The talks had an enthusiast bent, as developers explained in turn why they worked within a genre that has never really found a place on the international gaming stage. This was perhaps best seen when the team behind Fantasy Zone Complete Collection talked about how they’ve spent two years porting a series of old arcade games to PS2, drawing a firm and absolutely precise distinction between ‘true ports’ and ‘emulation.’ Okunari Yosuke, the producer from Sega, and Horii Naoki, CEO of developer M2, gave a fascinating insight into their (and presumably the community’s) sense of what’s important when paying tribute.


Fantasy Zone

The arcade original ran on the System 16 board, many levels less powerful than the PS2 hardware. Therefore, the games could have been ‘ported’ very easily using emulation software. Instead, the team redrew each sprite and its animation, making them identical to the original, and even managed to recreate its exact framerate – a marked contrast to the graphically ‘improved’ version released for PS2 in 2003.

M2 is a tiny company, composed of industry veterans, that specialises in remakes and ports, and Naoki painted a surprising picture of how a team can become fragmented as different staff decide to work on different sections of the project, emphasising that developing or remaking ‘classic’ shooters is not cheap or easy. In this context, the understanding that these types of games will always be expected to retail at ¥2,500 (£13 – Fantasy Zone Complete Collection is part of the Sega Ages 2500 series, named after the price) was clearly contentious: he ended by joking that the series should be renamed Sega Ages 6500.