Get Hyper.
Cave, a shoot-’em-up developer assembled from the ashes of Toaplan, was preparing to fold in 2001. The arcade scene was moving in new directions, relying on increasingly ostentatious Taikan cabinets to compete with the emerging technology of home consoles. For Cave, the 2D shoot ’em up, no matter how unerringly creative, was struggling to make the bottom line sing, and it was in large part thanks to Taiwanese company IGS that they survived another decade. Cave was so impressed with IGS’s PolyGame Master arcade hardware and the bastard Donpachi entry they had created for it, that they licensed the tech to have one last charge – events that would deliver DoDonpachi DaiOuJou, its suffix loosely translating as “blissful death”.
Tsuneki Ikeda, lead programmer, video game auteur, and then the company’s public face, lamented that he could never make anything as impressive as Ikaruga. He was wrong. Over time, DaiOuJou stands not only superior to Treasure’s polarising genre hybrid, but is considered by enthusiasts to be one of the greatest games ever coded. It’s the shoot-’em-up equivalent to Capcom’s Super Street Fighter II Turbo or SNK’s King of Fighters ’98: a signifying work that does not date, and compels people decades on to play for fresh achievements. In 2015, at Shanghai’s Lie Huo arcade, the expert DaiOuJou players casually ripped through its two loops like tin foil, cigarettes dangling idly from their mouths. When questioned, all were unanimous in citing it as the apex of the bullet-hell sub-genre. And they were right. Although its difficulty is a high bar, learning to play it is also to understand its genius.
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