Shoot 'em up
In the mid-1990s, shoot 'em ups became a niche genre based on design conventions established in the 1980s, and increasingly catered to specialist enthusiasts, particularly in Japan.
"Bullet hell" games are a subgenre of shooters that features overwhelming numbers of enemy projectiles, often in visually impressive formations.
Thus, the player's goal is to shoot as quickly as possible at anything that moves or threatens them to reach the end of the level, usually with a boss battle.
In Centipede (1980) and Gorf (1981), the player primarily moves left and right along the bottom, but several inches of vertical motion are also allowed within an invisible box.
Cute 'em ups tend to have unusual, oftentimes completely bizarre opponents for the player to fight, with Twinbee and Fantasy Zone first pioneering the subgenre,[22] along with Parodius, Cotton, and Harmful Park being additional key games.
[7] A popular implementation style of scrolling shooters has the player's flying vehicle moving forward, at a fixed rate, through an environment.
Examples include the vertically scrolling, overhead view games Front Line (1982), Commando (1985), and Ikari Warriors (1986).
[33] A small subgenre of shooter games that emphasizes chaotic, reflex-based gameplay designed to put the player in a trance-like state.
Jeff Minter is commonly credited with originating the style with Tempest 2000 (1994) and subsequent games including Space Giraffe, Gridrunner++, and Polybius (2017).
Other examples include the Geometry Wars series, Space Invaders Extreme, Super Stardust HD, and Resogun.
It had a more interactive style of play than earlier target shooting games, with multiple enemies who responded to the player-controlled cannon's movement and fired back at the player.
[61] Scramble, released by Konami in early 1981, had continuous scrolling in a single direction and was the first side-scrolling shooter with multiple distinct levels.
According to Eugene Jarvis, American developers were greatly influenced by Japanese space shooters but took the genre in a different direction from the "more deterministic, scripted, pattern-type" gameplay of Japanese games, towards a more "programmer-centric design culture, emphasizing algorithmic generation of backgrounds and enemy dispatch" and "an emphasis on random-event generation, particle-effect explosions and physics" as seen in arcade games such as his own Defender and Robotron: 2084 (1982) as well as Atari's Asteroids (1979).
Nintendo's attempt at the genre, Radar Scope (1980), borrowed heavily from Space Invaders and Galaxian, but added a three-dimensional third-person perspective; the game was a commercial failure, however.
The game received acclaim for its surreal graphics and setting and the protagonist, Opa-Opa, was for a time considered Sega's mascot.
[71] The game borrowed Defender's device of allowing the player to control the direction of flight and along with the earlier TwinBee (1985), is an early archetype of the "cute 'em up" subgenre.
[73] R-Type, an acclaimed side-scrolling shoot 'em up, was released in 1987 by Irem, employing slower paced scrolling than usual, with difficult, claustrophobic levels calling for methodical strategies.
[79] Taito's Front Line (1982) introduced the vertical scrolling format later popularized by Capcom's Commando (1985), which established the standard formula used by later run and gun games.
[81] Ikari Warriors also drew inspiration from the action film Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985),[57] which it was originally intended to be an adaptation of.
[81] Contemporary critics considered military themes and protagonists similar to Rambo or Schwarzenegger prerequisites for a shoot 'em up, as opposed to an action-adventure game.
[28] Konami's Green Beret (1985), known as Rush'n Attack in North America, adapted the Commando formula to a side-scrolling format.
[83] Later notable side-scrolling run and gun shooters include Namco's Rolling Thunder (1986), which added cover mechanics to the formula,[84] and Data East's RoboCop (1988).
By the early 1990s and the popularity of 16-bit consoles, the scrolling shooter genre was overcrowded, with developers struggling to make their games stand out, with exceptions such as the inventive Gunstar Heroes (1993) by Treasure.
[85] Sega's pseudo-3D rail shooter Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom demonstrated the potential of 3D shoot 'em up gameplay in 1982.
[86] Sega's Space Harrier, a rail shooter released in 1985, broke new ground graphically and its wide variety of settings across multiple levels gave players more to aim for than high scores.
[87][88] In 1986, Arsys Software released WiBArm, a shooter that switched between a 2D side-scrolling view in outdoor areas to a fully 3D polygonal third-person perspective inside buildings, while bosses were fought in an arena-style 2D battle, with the game featuring a variety of weapons and equipment.
[7][105] While shooter games featuring protagonists on foot largely moved to 3D-based genres, popular, long-running series such as Contra and Metal Slug continued to receive new sequels.
[114] The genre has undergone something of a resurgence with the release of the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii online services,[113] while in Japan arcade shoot 'em ups retain a deep-rooted niche popularity.
[115] Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved was released on Xbox Live Arcade in 2005 and in particular stood out from the various re-releases and casual games available on the service.
[116] The PC has also seen its share of dōjin shoot 'em ups like Crimzon Clover, Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony, Xenoslaive Overdrive, and the eXceed series.
