平安京エイリアン | Heiankyo Alien
Heiankyo Alien: Pitfall Trap Game – 1979 Sep? (uncommercialized proof of concept) – Apple ][
Space Invaders was big, and Weekly Asahi magazine would run a story searching for the next big game, soliciting college computer clubs around the nation for new ideas. After visiting 2 at the University of Tokyo, Itaru Kawakami of the Theoretical Science Group (TGS) led an emergency meeting to come up with an idea before the article would be published. He put forth the idea of a game where the player is in their home attempting to trap cockroaches. Another member, Mitsutoshi Tabata, has implied that the idea would’ve played like a Snake type of game, and I’ve seen it cited that you would use glue traps, so perhaps the Snake element was the danger of getting stuck by your own traps as you lay more and more down. A fan creation of this game has since been made called Vermin Wars. TGS, however, were cautious about giving the player too much freedom of movement in an open space, so the playing field would be reimagined to resemble a Go board where you place pieces at the intersections of squares instead of within them, almost as if the lines are the streets and the spaces are buildings in a city grid. This changed their setting from a home interior to a city! With everyone talking about this new horror movie, Alien, they decided that could be the new monster that you trap. In brainstorming a city to take place in, they landed on the nation’s former capitol, once called Heiankyo, which had an impressively strict grid, making it an easy leap for them to then have you play as law enforcement of the time, attempting to dig pitfall traps for the invading aliens. Asashi would publish the idea, resulting in them being contacted by electronics company Denki Onkyo, who were interested. The group looked to Tabata to program it, as he owned the legendary Apple II, but the one thing he couldn’t do was optimize it. Apparently the game took 10 minutes to even boot, so Kawakami stepped up to optimize it and met Tabata at the train station to take the entire Apple II, which is humorous to imagine them lugging around. He would ultimately decide to switch to the Apple II’s low-resolution mode, effectively quartering the resolution and changing the available approach to visuals, resulting in humans, aliens, and holes being different colored blocks. This build of Heiankyo Alien: Pitfall Trap Game was taken to Denki Onkyo as a sort of proof of concept. According to an article instructing readers on how to make their own TK-80 version of the game in the February 1980 issue of I/O magazine, there were already PC-8001 and MZ-80K versions as of writing the article, with some version of the game being shown at a school festival the previous year, presumably the Apple II version.
Heiankyo Alien – 1979 Nov – cabinet
They were set up on the first floor of the Oda district office. Kawakami and Keiichiro Shimada would become the project managers, with the team fleshing out what should and shouldn’t be done. They changed the street layout to be less uniform. A timer was added to end the game in the event that the player closed themselves off from danger, and, inspired by the idea of using candy to distract the slit-mouthed woman of legend, they wanted to include a hard candy that can be used to temporarily stop all the aliens from moving, but midway through development scrapped the idea as they found it overcomplicated the controls. With a sole keyboard to type out what they wrote and burn it to ROMs, every time they wanted to test if what they came up with worked, multiplayer modes would be added, having you either take turns or co-op with both of you on screen together. One thing Denki Onkyo pressed them for was to give the player an animation for when they met their end, resulting in the last-minute addition of an angel sprite to float away. The game would be demoed at the Amusement Machine Show in October, where it was discovered that adding too many coins would cause the coin counter to spill into VRAM, removing one of the city walls, allowing one of the aliens to wander off, scrambling the game’s data, but when all was said, patched, and done, it would hit arcades (as Digger in the U.S.) to great success, being among the highest-grossing arcade games in Japan. Game Center Arashi was a book series about its protagonist conquering arcade games with its story about him attempting to score 10 million points in Heiankyo Alien in 20 minutes, spotlighting not only the game but its strategies and terminology, making them even more accessible. These were also detailed in I/O magazine, who, in their April 1980 issue, announced TK-80BS, MZ-80K/C, and PC-8001 versions for sale. Desktop versions of the game from the time are usually distinguishable by their use of green instead of blue, outside of the handheld version. I also notice the cover of Game Center Arashi has more square-shaped, pink aliens and green buildings while the city walls remain the blue that I’m used to seeing the arcade version be. The handheld version uses condensed, repeating stages and greatly simplified visuals to keep the core gameplay intact while maintaining portability and affordability. It would inspire many future games like its side-view counterpart, Space Panic.
Heiankyo Alien – 1990 Jan 14th – Gameboy
“Denki Onkyo was bought by Murata Manufacturing, and the rights were left hanging, but when the Game Boy version was released, they were transferred to a company called Hyperware, which was run by Takeshige Arimasa, who was a colleague of my brother-in-law at TSG.”
-Norio Nakagata (alongside Takane Ohkubo are the Game Boy remake’s uncredited music artists)
As the 1980s rolled around, Denki Onkyo would not survive with the rights to Heiankyo Alien going up in the air. Hyperware was able to grab the rights and get to work on a remake. It features raising and lowering lanterns blocking the roads to keep the environment ever-shifting on the player and the monsters! A new boat mechanic allows you to traverse a river faster than taking the streets. Cinematics, including an ending, were added. While there would be a classic mode, the remake was rocking a faster pace to keep up with a new breed of alien sporting more erratic movement, and that’s not the only rocking being brought. The remake’s Multi Matrix Sound System (MMSS) is that when it’s multiplayer mode is linked to another Game Boy, it’ll combine both Game Boy’s sound systems into one, allowing for audio, twice as complex! The co-op of the original would return in classic mode, and the remake mode allows for competitive multiplayer where you each get your own screen and can affect each other’s game, sending aliens you’ve buried into their game as if you’re on opposite sides of the Earth, and those monsters evolve when they come up on the other side! The rebounded aliens can be taken out for good, and I have to mention how good the game’s overall branding is! The clean red, while only displaying the outlines of the monsters, is so classy yet harsh and vintage. Unfortunately for all involved, the remake did not seem well received in its time. Seemingly being dismissed as an overpriced repackaging of an antiquated 70’s game, even retrospective reviews years later were looking back on it negatively.
Nichibutsu Arcade Classics 2: Heiankyo Alien – 1995 Dec 15th – SFC
A new game for the SFC would attempt to try again with more screen real estate and modern graphics in the original game’s gameplay with multiple stages of dynamically dropping factors to deal with, from power-ups to power-downs to juke. This version would also not be a turning point for the series popularity. This also includes the ability to play “original” Heiankyo Alien, which plays like the arcade game but visually has an indigo background with green walls and buildings, which is not a color scheme of the official version of the ‘79 arcade game that I’m familiar with.
Heiankyo DX – 2003 Nov 17th – mova505i
After 2001 mobile versions, sporting both original and new graphics, a 2003 game titled Heiankyo DX would have you face 15 stages of alien tapping across night and day stages with further upgraded graphics. I’ve always wondered about the attitude toward mobile games from their regular players at this time. Perhaps the 2001 did alright to lead to Heiankyo DX, but the series overall 14-year absence following this gives me the impression it didn’t look like something with a lot of potential to commercially capitalize on, and I’d assume that simpler 1970s game design would have the best chance on phones at the time.
The 2017 Heiankyo Revival
Every time a new Heiankyo came out, it would mention how popular the original game was, as, much like Space Invaders that inspired it, its original entry was something it never recaptured, but, just like Space Invaders, that’s not to say that not just the legacy but the idea of new games was not appreciated by players like the fan game that added guns, Heiankyo Crisis. By the 2017 revival, I note a general change in tone of people voicing their opinions of Heiankyo from suspicious of its value as a commercial product to liking a new little game being offered, and I think the two factors that play into that are the lower relative price after inflation and in comparison to competition alongside Nintendo leading a shift in online and print discussions of home games away from almost only being the pushing forward of the bleeding edge of hardcore to also enjoying smaller, simpler games after the GameCube failed to set the world on fire. By the early 2010s, Minecraft seemed to cement this rapidly growing market and general tone change in video game discussions, leading to opinions of not just new Heiankyo games but older ones by first-time players seeming more open-minded to simpler than Triple-A games, though I do note Tetris on the Game Boy as an anomaly in this thinking. It again helped that people of the 21st century didn’t have to pay triple A price for Heiankyo games. Even outside of retro game prices in a pre-WataGames world, I remember people commenting in the 2010s how initial video game releases are cheaper than they ever have been due to the variance in prices on top of the great price reset PlayStation popularized. As of the publishing of this article, Triple A games are still less expensive than they were during the SNES generation. At least, that’s my suspicion for why the change in tone between the 90’s and 2010’s seemed to happen for Heiankyo, but let’s get into what they actually offered!
NEO Heiankyo Alien – 2017 Sep 7th – FC
NEO Heiankyo Alien is a Family Computer entry taking place in 299X where you can trap multiple types of aliens in a vibrant nightscape or play a version of the original that has a similar color scheme of the “original” mode in the 1995 game but neon blue and green, perhaps reusing the neon blue and green of Neo Kyoto in the new game mode. You could also just listen to the soundtrack featuring a nice list of composers in Heiankyo Music mode. Over the years, the soundtrack of the 1990 remake, since credited to Nakagata and Ohkubo, seemed to become the series identity, and Nakagata, who's credited as NEO Heiankyo’s producer, made a new song in that style for this game’s soundtrack too, though the show stealer for me was Bun’s song right at the top of the song list! There was a remixed version of the game’s soundtrack released, but it disappoints me that, unlike the Game Boy game, they never seemed to release the in-game version of the soundtrack.
Heiankyo Alien – 2017 Oct 13th – Windows 7-10
While Nakagata was working on NEO Heiankyo Alien, he was approached by Mikito Ichikawa, who heard Bug Fire was inspired by Heiankyo Alien and wanted to do his own remake of it for a series of remaking retro games that he was doing, resulting in another new Heiankyo game releasing! Now, technically there was a version of the original Heiankyo Alien officially released as shareware for Windows in 1999, but the 2017 game referred to as “Heiankyo Alien 3671” goes for a very colorful and enemy-filled rendition of the game as well as the ability to play a version of the arcade game that seems to be the more arcade-accurate (taller) aspect ratio with mock-ups of the cocktail table instructions used as borders, though it uses the same color scheme of blue roads and green buildings that NEO Heiankyo used, and I'm not sure if there was a version of the '79 arcade game in this color scheme. 3671, of course, also has quite the spotlight on music, even announcing an “Idol Version” in collaboration with a group called GUILDOLL. This never seemed to come to fruition, with people asking why the “idol mode” is grayed out in the menu years after the game seemed to stop being updated in 2021, despite advertising for it never being removed from the Steam store page. Even with that, the game is still generally praised by the minority that are aware of the Heiankyo series overall.
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