Toaplan

~ the obit ~

Toaplan was established as a company in April 1979 under Kiyoshi Motoyoshi, out of Shimizu in Suginami, Tokyo. The part anyone cares about started later, when two arcade developers called Orca and Crux both went bankrupt and most of the same team landed together inside Toaplan to keep doing the work somewhere.

Their first game was Performan in 1985. Tiger-Heli followed the same year, published by Taito, and that one set the house identity for the rest of the company's life. Vertical scrolling, one hit and you are dead, on a difficulty curve built around the assumption that you were feeding it coins. Truxton, Twin Cobra, Twin Hawk, Zero Wing and Snow Bros. all came out of the same building over the next six years.

Batsugun in 1993 is the one that matters technically. The enemy fire had gotten dense enough that individual bullets became a pattern you read rather than objects you dodged one at a time, and the hitbox shrank to compensate. That trade is the entire grammar of the danmaku shooter, and it was written down in the last full year Toaplan was alive.

The company declared bankruptcy on 31 March 1994. Snow Bros. 2 was among the last things it finished. No public explanation of the failure ever circulated in any detail, which for a Japanese arcade house in 1994 is not unusual, and the arcade business itself was about a year from the bottom falling out.

The only piece of Toaplan that ever reached me arrived as text. Around 2001 and 2002 that one line was everywhere i looked online, sitting in forum signatures and inside a Flash file people mailed each other, and i had no idea it came from a game. Those were my internet cafe years, and at home a Flash animation was something you started downloading and then went and did something else. Nobody quoting it knew the company that wrote it had been wound up in a Tokyo court seven years earlier. That includes me, for a long time.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the mistranslation ~

Zero Wing went into Japanese arcades on 1 July 1989. The version that mattered was the Mega Drive port that came out in Europe in July 1991, because that one added an opening cutscene the arcade board never had. The English was not written by a translator. It was written by a member of the design team who happened to handle the export side, and the programmer Tatsuya Uemura has said plainly on the record that this person's English was terrible.

It sat there for eight years. The animated GIF started passing around forums in 1999 and 2000, Jeffrey Ray Roberts cut a techno remix of it in November 2000, and on 16 February 2001 a user called Bad_CRC posted the music video to Newgrounds. That was the ignition. It is one of the few memes of that decade with no vulgarity in it at all, which is probably why it went as far as it did and why it ended up on a university news ticker in 2004 and inside a YouTube maintenance page in 2006.

~ what got buried with it ~

Toaplan's other export was music. Masahiro Yuge and Tatsuya Uemura wrote scores for hardware with a handful of channels and got melodies out of it that people still arrange for live bands, which is a strange afterlife for background music written to be heard over an arcade floor.

The design side got buried more completely. Toaplan spent nine years working out how much a player can actually track on screen, and the answer turned out to be far more than anyone assumed. Every studio that came after took that answer and pushed it, and none of them credited a company that had already stopped existing.

~ what replaced it ~

The staff scattered into new companies almost immediately. CAVE was founded by a group of them including Tsuneki Ikeda and Kenichi Takano, and went on to define the commercial bullet hell shooter for the next fifteen years. Raizing, later Eighting, took another part of the team. Tamsoft came out of Toshiaki Ota, Gazelle and Takumi out of others, and Takumi finished the Twin Cobra sequel that Toaplan had not lived to ship.

The catalog itself went quiet for two decades before Masahiro Yuge set up a company called Tatsujin, named after the Japanese title of Truxton, which now holds nearly every Toaplan property. Embracer bought Tatsujin in August 2022. So the games belong to a Swedish holding company now, and the studio that made them has been gone longer than it was ever alive.

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