We’ve made our way back to the NES library! That’s always nice. This week, we’re talking about Ultra Games’ 1989 release Gyruss:
If the name Ultra Games sounds familiar, it may be because they also released the Retro Roulette game from week 7, Mission: Impossible. That game may have been awful, but thankfully Ultra didn’t always make garbage (though the utterly miserable first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game is their fault). In addition to Gyruss, Ultra (an offshoot of Konami made to get around Nintendo’s “five games per company year” limit) also made Skate or Die! and the original Metal Gear.
The backstory for Gyruss, while minimal, is completely ridiculous – the solar system has been invaded by a group of aliens called Visigoths, who are hellbent on destroying human colonies on every planet. Naturally, there is but one space hero (you) who can do anything about this, so you set off to stop them. The Visigoths are led by, I kid you not, a revived and immortalized Genghis Khan:
Strangely, the insane backstory is specific to the NES version – its original version and other ports don’t have any of this. Gyruss was first released as an arcade game in 1983, and save for the Genghis Khan business the NES version is a reasonably faithful adaptation. It plays a bit like Galaga, but with the visual layout of Tempest. Your ship moves in a set circle near the edges of the screen, firing inward towards the center as waves of enemy ships and bombs come outward towards the player.
If that sounds like a good combination to you, you’re right! Gyruss is a lot of fun. It’s reasonably fast-paced like the arcade original (though the NES version has more levels and a few other extra features). The game offers two control schemes that handle rotating around the screen differently, one of which I found far more intuitive than the other (this will probably be your experience playing as well). There are dozens of levels and bosses to get through, and it’s quite the challenge. Part of my struggles were continuously mistaking explosions for powerups, but once I figured that out, it felt far more reasonable.
Each level begins by telling you how far you are from the next planet (aka boss battle), beginning with Neptune. To my surprise, Gyruss depicted Pluto as being closer to the Sun than Neptune, which was accurate at the time of the game’s release (though the game is also set in the 2500s, so, uh…whatever):
Here’s another cool fact about Gyruss – it’s soundtrack is a video game-ified version of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. Bach could not be reached for comment.
The career of Gyruss’s creator, Yoshiki Okamoto is an interesting one – shortly after creating the game, Konami fired him, in part because he was given (and subsequently ignored) instructions to make a driving game instead. He was quickly hired by Capcom, for whom he worked on the likes of 1942, Gun.Smoke, Street Fighter II, and Resident Evil. That’s a hell of a resume! He later left Capcom to run his own studio, which produced little of note before folding (though they were responsible for the super interesting PS3 action-RPG Folklore). Nowadays, he works in mobile games, and is one of the folks behind the hit Monster Strike.
If you enjoy retro shooters, Gyruss is a solid pickup – it’s not particularly rrare or sought-after, so it can easily be found for 10 bucks or less. It’s also available in a handful of Konami compilations, as well as on the Xbox Live Arcade.
We’ll be sticking with the NES for next week’s game, which is a weird little thing that I probably enjoy more than most people. See you then!