The Namco Chronicles, part 10...

It was not very hard to separate the designers working at Namco from what they had produced. The games released by the company had a certain aesthetic style associated with them, a Namco “fingerprint” if you will. Gamers sometimes confused the word graphics for aesthetics when they talked about the look of a game. To be clear it was the stylization of the characters, vehicles and environments that made up the aesthetic of the title. It had nothing to do with whether the game was sprite or polygon-based. Some developers earned a following for how aesthetically pleasing their games were. Titles like Katamari Damacy and Jet Set Radio had unmistakable aesthetics.

Seasoned players could tell which development team had worked on a particular title just by looking at the game. Through the history of Namco the development teams had used a certain aesthetic to connect the various franchises. In some examples they were obvious, like the Bosconian ships that appeared in Galaga ’88 and Blast Off. In other cases they were very subtle and could have been easily overlooked. The details in the background, the terrain and architecture of certain games had some crossover and this was sometimes missed by players. The longest running string of hits from the company had been rooted in UGSF continuity. The developers working on other games were proud of their contribution and wanted to make sure that the series lived on in one way or another. It was especially important to them once the era of the arcade shooter had died off. The angular buildings and factories used in Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere were reminiscent of the Andor Genesis, the alien mothership featured in Xevious. This was no coincidence. The developers were very slowly shaping the world to fit into the storyline of future releases.

The first game that the developers looked at made the most sense canonically. The Ace Combat series featured military aircraft fighting for supremacy over fictionalized nations. The game always had a forward-thinking tilt to it. Like Tekken and Ridge Racer the game was set a few years in the future and had all the supporting details to reinforce that idea. Whether it was the aircraft, the weapon technology or even the details in the city, everything about the games screamed progress. For audiences it was just a fun dogfighting simulator with dozens of different aircraft types and plenty of memorable missions to keep them engaged. Ace Combat actually made great use of a gameplay technique that the development team had learned from Ridge Racer.

Players had to earn their aircraft by completing scenarios. Finishing levels in a timely manner and also side objectives meant that players could earn better aircraft than those that simply finished the main missions. In a similar way the players of Ridge Racer earned superior cars by beating track times and challenges. Simply completing a race was not enough to earn the best cars in the game. This forced serious players to learn the nuances of each car and track. Players learned how to draft and block, how to find a line through a crowd and when to use the nitro boost. As players improved they were able to upgrade their existing cars and earn better rides.

In Ace Combat players had to learn the complexities of dog fighting in a rather short timeframe. The lessons and complex math equations that they would have been taught in training school would never have worked in a high-paced game setting. So every mission became on the job training. How to lead a target, how to fly defensively and even how to line up targets ahead of time were the nuances that players had to learn. Players that mastered the intricacies of fighting were rewarded with the best possible aircraft in the game. Ridge Racer by comparison had made it easier for players to unlock the best cars in the game. They did not necessarily have to be the best drivers on the track, but rather be the best at drifting and using nitro boosts. In real life and in more realistic racing games, a well-executed drift required finesse and solid driving skills.

In Ridge Racer a drift recharged the nitrous tanks. So a player that became good at drifting could keep boosting and pass up opponents more easily. The game engine even adjusted the direction of the car as it slid to compensate for the lack of driving skills from a player. This sort of hands-free driving was most apparent when the car was moving very quickly. In every turn all the player had to do was initiate a drift. The game would take over and pull the car around the corner at the perfect angle. The player did not have to do any sort of steering so long as they were going very quickly. Only at lower speeds were they expected to steer the car. This was not always the case, early Ridge Racer games were demanding on the drivers. Rage Racer forced players to become better drivers and react faster and faster with every class upgrade. There was no sort of automatic steering to help guide players around turns.

Ace Combat by comparison did not try to dumb down the combat experience. In order to achieve the best possible aircraft the player would have to become a better fighter. Objectives were spaced out early on in the game and combat was limited so that audiences could learn the controls. Little by little the difficulty would increase. More targets would be added and more opponents would join in the battle. By the end of the game the player would find themselves reacting at lightning speed and taking on dozens of opponents. Namco and their developers used this learning curve to their advantage so they could create some of the most amazing combat portions in modern gaming. The gut-wrenching Trinity Missile Strike on the White House at the end of Ace Combat Assault Horizon was a perfect example of that. On the other hand Ridge Racer did not introduce new tracks that took advantage of the fastest cars in the game, making the final races in the title feel anti-climactic.

What could never be debated was how amazing the vehicle designs were in either game. I had already highlighted how the cars in Ridge Racer took the best elements in production and concept cars and put them on the track. For the Ace Combat series the developers took cues from the best fighter jets and prototypes and put them all in the sky. Some of the most radical ideas in aviation would become the backbone of the series. From the stealthiest fighter to the most gigantic airborne command cruisers had a place in the Ace Combat universe. The diversity of designs and jet types called out to every spectrum of fan, just as the cars big and small had done for Ridge Racer.

There was an unmistakable science fiction element to the Ace Combat series. It wasn’t enough that the planes were futuristic. They had to fit the vision of aircraft a few generations down the line. The way their aeronautics looked and worked had to be believable. The way weapons were stored and fired, the ability to deflect missiles and defend themselves from enemy fire had to be plausible as well. The people at Namco had to cover all of the angles from a design standpoint and still create a story that was immersive that would help bring players into the experience.

Ridge Racer had the fortune of being a racing game and allowed a player to assume the role of a faceless character. The drivers did not necessarily need to be spoken to by a crew chief or even a teammate but when those details were available, as in Ridge Racer Type 4 and R: Racing Evolution then it was appreciated. For the most part the cars chosen by the player spoke for themselves. Ace Combat had a similar gameplay element going for it. Players were faceless pilots and the planes they selected did all the talking for them. The supporting characters, the wingmen and rivals all spoke to the player and didn’t expect a response, this type of writing helped maintain the illusion. The Ace Combat series would actually become a nexus that bridged the canon of Namco’s past to the future. The next blog will highlight these connections. As always if you would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!

The Namco Chronicles, part 9...

The first time that I realized the games in the Namco universe were connected was actually by accident. It was around 1989 and the arcade scene was pretty strong. It would still be a few years until Street Fighter II dropped and forced every company to get into the genre. So there was a lot more diversity for the few years leading up to it and that was a good thing. A new space shooter from Namco had appeared at about that time. The game was titled Blast Off and looked interesting for a number of reasons. The graphics were bright and colorful. Gone were the blocky ships that I remembered while growing up. The new ship had more fidelity than before, the proportions were slightly cartoonish but it was a small oversight. The backgrounds were amazing. There were several graphic layers that the artists had worked with to create an amazing sense of depth.

Players would fly through plasma clouds, above twinkling stars and galactic clusters. It felt like a redo of Galaga that was closer to the vision of the designers. The enemy types were more detailed but still flew strafed opponents in dizzying patterns, the larger ships were there to provide a bigger challenge and the end of every level was met with a boss battle. Unlike other SHMUP titles which forced players to stick with one weapon type until they could earn an upgrade Blast Off gave players multiple weapon configurations. Players could switch between the weapon types on the fly. There were variations of a wave, laser and photon cannon that allowed players to shoot forward, diagonal, sideways and even behind the player. This completely changed the strategy when fighting waves of enemies. Sometimes diagonal or sideways lasers could help get through a particularly tough stage better than any forward facing weapon.

Where the game really came together was in the layout of the missions. Every level consisted of three missions. The first mission was set in deep space as the player was en route to a target. They would engage with small reconnaissance craft and a few scattered larger ships at this point. The second stage was much closer to the objective and players had to fight against wave after wave of tougher opponent classes. In the background of each stage players would catch a glimpse of the level boss. It was an enormous base with six spheres connected to a hexagonal hub. When players finished the second mission they would see the ship fly towards the enormous target. The third mission actually took place inside of the base. The camera would zoom in on players and present a more detailed close up of the ship once inside of the base. Players fought through increasingly difficult areas, filled with sentry cannons and tanks as they went into the heart of the station. If players could defeat the mechanical core, which was protected by a complex series of rapidly moving cannons then they would finish the stage. Players would fly out of the base and watch it explode from a distance. They would then continue on deeper into space and fight larger and more challenging stations. The largest of which appeared like a row of Death Stars connected at the hip.

It was the sense of scale that really made Blast Off stick out in my mind. Namco had done a great job at taking a format that I thought couldn't really be improved upon and broke it wide open. Granted, when it came to video games the SHUMP format was the one I was terrible at. By comparison my big brother excelled at those titles but wasn't very good at racing games. I was good in many other genres but didn't quite have the patience or determination to see most SHUMPS through to the end. Blast Off could be considered slow and simplistic to many veterans but for me it felt like a perfect challenge. The idea of being the solitary fighter taking on an entire fleet in deep space was something I couldn't pass up. It was like the best parts of Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and every other space adventure rolled into one.

Also, unlike earlier space shooters this one had a beginning, middle and end. The game did not just get faster and harder, like the earlier Namco hits. Blast Off started with the fighter leaving a space carrier with an electronic fanfare that sounded an awful lot like the John William's Superman theme. During the end credits the player would revisit the site of every boss station and see its debris floating in the distance. Eventually they would land back at the home base, the biggest hero in the entire galaxy. It was a rare SHUMP that I managed to beat in the arcade and only with a handful of quarters. In my book it was perfection. That was of course until Namco released Starblade.

It wasn't long after I had played Blast Off than the pieces suddenly started to fit together. I was walking by someone going through Galaga '88. I noticed a number of improvements that the company had made to the original shooter. Even though I was still in junior high at that time a wave of nostalgia had washed over me. I remember being very young and playing the original Galaga in the corner market. Galaga '88 had improved in the visual and gameplay department by a wide margin. While the majority of the game still took place on single screen levels the enemy types were much more challenging and diverse. It was the jump from location to location using warp technology that caught my eye. Players could see the final destination getting closer each time they defeated a stage and the ship would disappear into hyperspace.

The effect would be revisited in the 3D games like Star Ixiom and Starblade. One of the backgrounds looked eerily familiar to Blast Off. There was an enormous hexagonal space station that was destroyed floating in the distance. There was no way that this game was related to Blast Off was there? As the player went through the stage he got closer to the debris. There was no mistaking it. The Galaga ship was fighting near the remains of the same space stations that I had beaten earlier. When I looked at the title screen I saw that Blast Off was released after Galaga '88. So it was some sort of sequel? I remember seeing ships that were very similar to those in Blast Off and Galaga '88 but much earlier. I just couldn't remember where. I bugged my parents to take me to different arcades every weekend so I could look for the other Namco games that might be related to Blast Off. Finally I came across the game in Cerritos, in an arcade that had some older titles still in circulation.

It turned out that the ancestor to both games was a 1981 gem called Bosconian. It was built on the Galaga engine but featured completely different gameplay. In the title players could fly and shoot in eight directions and they had to destroy enemy bases that were hexagonally shaped. The neat thing about the game was that players could fire lasers from the rear of the ship so they couldn't be caught off guard by opponents. This was clearly the inspiration for the weapon types and villains featured in Blast Off. Bosconian was also notable because it was the first Namco game, possibly the first arcade game ever, to feature a continue screen. When I discovered that there was a lineage to the Namco space shooters it blew my mind. I felt like I was living through some sort of Dan Brown conspiracy that had been kept secret from the world. No other studio seemed to grasp the nuances of keeping true to a legacy. Instead they produced games that had nothing to do with each other. Namco was focused on the evolution of a genre and never forgot where they came from.

A few years later the origins of the word Bosconian were revealed, at least in canon. The alien life forms were very advanced technologically but also very hostile. They sought out planets to conquer and transform. It was up to the brave Galaxians, the people that traveled to the edge of space as members of the UGSF, to protect humanity. The name Bosconian was derived from one of the most brilliant minds in the Namco universe Dr. Geppetto Bosconovitch. The scientist formerly employed by Mishima Zaibatsu was a genius with few peers. Dr. Bosconovitch had appeared as an important figure throughout the Tekken series. In the game history he had created the cybernetic arm and later cybernetic body for Yoshimitsu, the leader of the Manji Ninja Clan.

He also created the Prototype Jack (P-Jack) combat cyborg. He was not only good at cybernetic components but also developed the bio-weapons Roger and Alex. Those were creatures that appeared like a velociraptor and kangaroo with boxing gloves. The scientist was not without his rivals however, Dr. Abel was a scientist also working for the Mishima Zaibatsu that became a bitter enemy. Dr. Abel focused his efforts on mind control technology and could command some of the characters in the Tekken series to do his bidding. He also reanimated Brian Fury and destroyed the peaceful Jack cyborg models at every opportunity.

Dr. Bosconovitch developed the "Cold Sleep" program as a form of suspended hibernation. It also seemed to stop the aging process. He tested it out on Nina and Anna Williams, top level assassins that worked for the Mishima Zaibatsu and G Corporation respectively. He intended the Cold Sleep program to preserve the life of his terminally ill daughter Alisa. When Alisa succumbed to her disease Dr. Bosconovitch made an android in her likeness and assigned her to be the bodyguard of Jin Kazama, his new employer. It was the brilliant mind of the doctor that would be remembered centuries after his death. When a new technologically advanced alien species was discovered the UGSF named them Bosconian.

As I got older and was able to travel further and further I managed to play more games in the arcade by Namco and their contemporaries. I was also lucky enough to travel with my brothers and friends to Little Tokyo and see what Super Famicom / Super Nintendo Games were hot and what the real gems were for the Playstation and Saturn consoles. I was very eager to find out where Namco would connect their next game to the Bosconian legacy. It turned out that a little-known PC game from 1994 was another missing link from the company. Star Luster was an amazing remake of an old NES title.

It even featured updated versions of the classic chip tunes. In this title an evil alien race called the Battura were causing strife not long after the Bosconian Wars. The game took place in the same continuity of Galaga ’88 and Blast Off but featured a first-person perspective instead of a vertical one. It was the template that Star Ixiom would use for the Playstation a few years later. Seeing Namco stay true to their continuity for as long as I could remember made me fans of the company. I admired their own science fiction IP and had more respect for it than most licensed space games. I was curious to see what else the studio had tied together through canon. As it turned out Tekken was not the only game that had a connection to UGSF continuity. The seeds of the series had been planted in a different title. The next blog will feature this game. As always if you would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!

The Namco Chronicles, part 8...

If you were to ask gamers which science fiction universe they would love to live in they might respond with a variety of choices. Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Mass Effect and Halo would probably be near the top of the list. Yet if you were to ask me which one was my favorite I wouldn't have to think hard about it. The UGSF continuity from Namco was by far the most interesting to me. It represented various stages in the fictional history of mankind.

From the first tentative steps into other solar systems to the first encounters against hostile alien lifeforms. The future of humanity was set in all of the beauty and chaos of the cosmos. There was sometimes a great struggle against monsters and creatures too horrible to imagine but also tremendous strides for human lifeforms across trillions of light years. As a kid that grew up admiring all of the sciences, but especially space science, this was a fascinating series to me.

Namco had been working through dozens of original titles over the past 30 years and tried to connect the dots on most of them. The UGSF series actually stretched out from the middle of this century (2040) all the way to the year 7650. Past that was unknown because Namco had yet to plan for it. To connect all of the dots that Namco had mapped out would include the history of civilization on Earth as well. The earliest adventures in Namco canon took place in ancient Babylon, some 3000+ years ago. The company had published adventures set at various points through the history of the world, including the feudal era in Japan, the dark ages in Europe and even the current era. In all the studio had over 10,000 years of canon that they could work from and jump to. It had taken Namco more than 30 years to amass a library of games that supported their obsession with canon. It was a feat that would have been impossible for any other studio to recreate. That was why I admired the company and their science fiction work more than any other studio.

Everything Namco created came from somewhere, it had a backbone and a heart. It was much more than a facade which was all that most modern game publishers could offer in their games. It was brilliant the way the company retconned the classic games like Dig Dug and Baraduke so that they fell in the same continuity as Galaxian and Galaga. The best part about the publisher was that they kept copious notes and arts on every UGSF title. In other science fiction titles there was a specific timeline that most games focused on. Perhaps there was a generation or two at stake like in Star Trek, or perhaps there was even a few centuries separating the adventures as in Star Wars. For the UGSF there were decades, centuries and even millennia that were points of interest for fans. The company actually knew how mankind managed to stretch from one end of the galaxy to the other. They knew every battle along the way, every technological achievement and every story worth telling. Those high points turned out to be the first generation of arcade, console and even mobile hits from the publisher.

Growing up playing just about every arcade game that Namco published, especially those about space, had preserved that same sense of awe and wonder that I had as a kid. When I worked at JPL and was doing mission support over a few years, including the landing of the Curiosity rover, I felt as it all the quarters I had spent in my youth had finally paid off. From an artist and designer point of view I became enamored with the stylization of the ships from UGSF canon. They were not quite animé nor western sci-fi. The company had found a balance between the two that was awe inspiring. From the stealthy Coleoptera Fighter in Galaga to the massive Dragoon-J2 in Attack of Zolgear, there was a genuine sense of evolution for all of the fighter craft. It was something that not every team of designers could capture in other science fiction titles.

Of course every long-time fan of the UGSF series would ask where the overlap was. Several of the biggest titles happened within a few decades of each other, and some within galactic reach. Namco answered this question in the Kuusou Kagaku-developed Star Ixiom. The title from 1999 was considered the pinnacle space shooter for the original Playstation. It became the benchmark from the publisher just as Ridge Racer Type 4 was for racers. The game blended the heroes and villains from a literal who's-who of UGSF canon, including Starblade, Galaxian, Nebulas Ray, Star Luster and Bosconian. The game was set in a first person perspective. Missions were spread all over the galaxy and what made the game innovative, aside from the free flying 3D dogfights, was the ability to "warp" from location to location. The stars would form a tunnel as players passed light speed and reached objective markers. It was the same classic effect of making the jump to light speed from Star Wars except now players could choose where they would visit with each jump.

The game could be held up to the standards set by Wing Commander and the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron series. The downside was that this game never saw the light of day in the USA. It was released in Japan and Europe only. Thankfully emulators helped die-hard fans in the states get a chance to experience it. It was a shame too, the game was beautifully done. It mixed the designs from each of the distinct universes well. It maintained the sense of scale and adventure from Starblade while allowing players to pick up missions on the home bases. The ability to progress through the missions at the leisure of the gamer was something that no Namco arcade game could ever allow. From a design standpoint every cameo made sense. Remember that some of the technology employed by early colonists, the Galaxians, were still in operation several generations later. Players would visit stations that looked obsolete in one sector of space and much more advanced in a different sector. The UGSF made do with the resources of every particular home world and defended it to the best of their abilities. It was a much more realistic approach to science fiction logistics than had been seen in other media.

Star Ixiom was not the only gem that Namco kept from the west. Most of the decisions to keep a game in one region were business related of course. I often wish that the marketing people and bean counters did not have as much pull at the studio as they do now. Without taking a chance on new ideas the company would have stopped evolving after Galaxian and Pac-Man. Instead they decided to compete against the big boys in multiple genres. They took the battle to Sega and matched the juggernaut game-for game. Sometimes they had a better experience and sometimes they didn't. Unlike Sega however Namco did not seem to give up on their oldest franchises.

In 2007 the company decided to try their hand at a completely different format for the UGSF series. New Space Order was an an arcade/PC real-time strategy (RTS) game. It was the first time the classic universe had been presented in such a format. It seemed to work very well too. Players chose from one of four different human factions as they tried to expand their respective empires throughout the stars. The ability to command entire fleets of classic and new ships from UGSF history was a real treat. Well designed space RTS games were extremely rare. The genre had been used in popular fantasy and science fiction ground combat titles like Warcraft and Starcraft. The format hadn't been seen very much in space shooters.

The game was actually set during some of the most formative years of the UGSF. In order to bring audiences into this world Namco produced New Space Order - Link of Life - a web drama from 2007. The series explained how far humanity had come and how factions had grown out of planetary ties. It told the story through the eyes of a select group of young pilots, engineers and officers. Each held a distinct view of their world and told the story of how their nation and planet had to fight in order to keep their history and culture alive. What was great about the series was how much in depth they went into the actual canon established by the game series. Many of the notes and designs that the company had been sitting on were finally brought out.

The web series and game managed to touch on many of the high points of UGSF canon. They brought out the relationships between the classic arcade and consoles hits and gave them entirely new dimensions. They explained the origins and outcomes of the wars against ETI (extra terrestrial intelligence) from Galaga, Bosconian and Battsura. They highlighted how humanity had developed ships that were designed to combat the most highly evolved of alien species, such as the robotic UIMS. Many of these ships were several kilometers in size with the largest mobile platforms being as big as an asteroid. The smaller ships turned out to be very useful in combat because they could bypass the defenses of the more massive targets. Players actually got a chance to set up both offensive and defensive capabilities for their particular factions. They would have to figure out which ships worked best for certain missions and how they would have to adapt to constantly changing threats. Namco dubbed this form of gameplay "Fleet Assault Tactics."

The game was absolutely gorgeous. It had twinkling stars and spiraling galaxies billions of light years in the distance. Players learned to terraform and connect their planets and navigate around asteroid clusters while defending their home worlds. With a much more laid back classical soundtrack to help the player feel more like a military strategist than a space cowboy. The title was taken offline in 2009 much to the disappointment of the fans. I can understand that it was a business decision. Arcade games were a hard sell in the US and western audiences favored action over RTS titles by a wide margin.

Of course I would hope that someday soon the company would return to their galactic roots. New Space Order and the other experiences from UGSF canon certainly deserved more chances. Even without a new science fiction title in the works the influence of the space legacy was hard to ignore. The UGSF canon had become ingrained in the culture of Namco. It would pop up in some of the least suspected titles. When it did it gave long-time gamers a chance to reflect and long for the future. If you would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!

The Namco Chronicles, part 7...

Namco showed that they were a major player in the arcade industry with the success of Galaxian in 1979 and its follow-up Galaga in 1981. The games were so successful that they helped their US distributor Midway grow by leaps and bounds as well. The success of the Pac-Man, Ridge Racer, Tekken and Ace Combat titles helped cement Namco's position as leaders in entertainment. The space shooters from the company had always done well historically. Each game was an innovator for the genre, whether it introduced a scrolling background, added a bonus stage or chaned formats from sprites to 3D polygons.

Namco was willing to experiment with their formula in order to keep the experience fresh but most important to keep audiences engaged. Something that won over fans was consistency with the genre. The most celebrated titles had a familiar feel to them. The fingerprints of the developers were all over the games even when they were in a completely new genre. Why was this? Because the development teams kept copious notes on each and every game they had created. This was nothing new to the industry. The teams working behind every great series could fill volumes with concept designs, notes, background, programming lessons and even blueprints. What separated Namco from their contemporaries however was something more obsessive.

The designers would lose sleep over details never seen by audiences. In order to build a better game the developers had to become intimate with the fictional world they were creating. In the case of the space shooters it would be fleshing out the canon of the UGSF (United Galaxy Space Force). Absolutely no detail was overlooked. The signage on the spaceships, both good and bad had to be planned out. The colors, framework and layout of ships were cataloged. Bases, planets, weapons and technology all had to be meticulously detailed. Even though the company had no plans to create a game where the pilots inside the ships were ever seen the designers still kept notes on them. The layout of the cockpit, seats, displays, the shape of the helmets, the cut of UGSF uniforms for both officer and soldier ranks, what the space suits looked like, if they were strapped with a weapon and even how their rank would be displayed had to be considered. Certainly many modern AAA studios could show how their teams of artists did the same thing during the development of a modern blockbuster. Of the current studios none would have allowed their designers the leeway to focus on things that would not appear in any way shape or form in the finished game.

The insanely detailed notes and volumes of concept art became shared knowledge in the offices of Namco. In many cases these things decorated the walls of the offices. It wasn't an employee working here or there that seemed to know the particulars of the science fiction world Namco was developing it was the collective that knew about it. They all contributed to the development of the UGSF canon over the years. The studio did not seem to forget even the tiniest little detail either. For example, when people think of the ship featured in Galaga they might imagine a tiny white space jet that could be joined at the wing to another. If the fans were asked to draw it from memory they might even be able to sketch out a design that resembled the blocky ship from the arcade hit. Yet the people at Namco had a lot more in mind than audiences could have ever imagined. First off it had a name and class. The star of the game was the Coleoptera Fighter. In other Namco games the ships would become much larger, more defensive and carry different names. The fighters appearing in many of the early Namco hits were limited by the capabilities of the graphics engines and not by the imagination of the developers.

The artists wanted to present a spaceship that would hold up to the greatest designs from film and animé. Fans could identify T.I.E. fighters and X-Wings with just a few pixels, unfortunately for Namco they had to rely on the imagination of gamers to fill in the details missing for their own craft. Something similar could be said of the gameplay of those early UGSF hits. The designers had epic space battles in mind while planning out the adventures. They had grow up on a steady diet of amazing shows and animation, including Captain Harlock, Space Battleship Yamato and Star Wars. They wanted to capture the action featured in those titles but allow the audiences to become the heroes of the story. Of course it was tough to include any sort of story with the limitations of the early arcade hardware. With barely any memory, a few tones from the sound board and a limited color palette the developers at Namco had to focus on making a fun game first and foremost. They would have to pack away their ambitious goals until technology had caught up with their imagination. The people working on the space shooters were not alone with these struggles.

Other groups within Namco worked on different genres. One in particular worked on maze games for the studio. Mappy and Pac-Man had done very well in the genre. Yet even those designers had to explore the boundaries of what was possible. They introduced elements of science fiction into the format. The first of these new experiences was Dig Dug. The hit from 1982 made little to no sense to the western gamer. Try to describe the game to someone, especially a non-gamer. There was a little blue man that would dig tunnels with a jackhammer and then shoot at dragons and orange masked balls with an air hose. He would then inflate them until they exploded and that's how you earned points. It sounded like a bad acid trip rather than a video game. Thirty years later it still did not make any sense. Not that it mattered though because gamers in the west and east could not get enough of the experience. It was a challenging maze game that introduced all sorts of new elements and enemy types. It also created some memorable mascots along the way. Baraduke raised the bar on space exploration. The title from 1986 wasn't a puzzle game but actually allowed the main character to travel through an alien outpost instead, running, flying and shooting everything along the way. The hero of this game was actually a female, a UGSF soldier named Masuyo "Kissy" Toby. It was a fantastic concept that had predated heroines like Samus from the Metroid series. While the mascots featured in those games were blocky little characters the designers always kept in mind some more realistic representations of them for future use.

It was about this time in the '80s that Namco began working in earnest to shape the UGSF continuity. The designers began looking back on their catalog of games and began finding relationships between the various titles. The company decided that Masuyo was actually the estranged wife of Dig Dug himself, a fellow that went by the name of Taizo Hori. The name Taizo Hori was actually a play on words, in Japanese his name sounded like "I like to dig." The two characters had kids which would appear in games that followed many years later. Susumu Hori, Ataru Hori and Taiyo Toby came into their own in a series called Mr. Driller and Star Trigon at the end of the '90s and start of the new millennium respectively. The reasons why Hori and Toby were separated were never revealed by Namco. Some artists speculated why they were an estranged couple but nothing definitive was ever posted.

It would not be the first time that mature themes were explored in science fiction. The origins for Baraduke were rooted in the film Alien. The movie was one of the first to combine horror and science fiction equally well. The film starred Sigourney Weaver as a space explorer named Ellen Ripley. In it her team of miners came across an extinct alien settlement. When one of them became infected with an alien parasite it quickly turned into a life or death struggle for the entire crew. The entire tone of the film was handled very seriously. There was nothing remotely fantastic about the content as was the case with Star Wars, instead the story played out as an earnest drama should. Violence and gore aside it certainly was not meant for children. The 1979 movie forever changed the landscape of cinema and became a cultural touchstone for what space exploration could become.

Alien had influenced the designers at several Japanese studios when it debuted. Sega's Alien Syndrome from 1987 and Alien Storm from 1990 were two completely different takes on the genre, one was serious and one was very over-the-top but both had hints of the classic film in it as well. The 1986 hit Metroid for the original Nintendo Entertainment System was also influenced by the film. Through all of the changes in science fiction and gaming over the past 40 years Namco would stay focused on their own continuity, They kept grinding away at the UGSF universe and never lost track of what could become. When the industry began to change its operations to focus on 3D engines Namco was already ahead of the curve. Many of the developers working at the studio had a good idea as to what the next great hits from the company would be.

The advancement of 3D graphics in the arcade and on home consoles turned out to be the biggest gain in company history. The programmers and animators could finally put on screen what they had spent an entire generation only dreaming of. Even the iconic battles in Galaga became more mesmerizing when visualized as actual 3D engagements. Solvalou, Galaxian³ and Starblade were the first chapters in a run that no other studio would be able to match. The next blog will look at the nexus of the UGSF at home. I’d like to hear about it in the comments section. As always if you would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!