Space Fire Bird / Space Demon

"Photon gun explosives"  --Space Demon instructions

Developer
Nintendo R&D3

Release Date
Space Fire Bird - October, 1980 
Space Demon - Late 1980 / 1981


At this stage in its history Nintendo were breaking into, but arguably not thriving in, the arcade market with a line-up alternating between mechanical innovations and generic filler. By and large, the company's arcade titles were mistakable for the work of any electronics manufacturer of the day and had yet to settle upon a cohesive sense of identity.

The dissatisfaction I had with the generic nature of Heli Fire goes doubly so for Space Fire Bird. Shooting-at-things-in-space was not a genre in scarce supply in 1980, fitting as it did both the technological capabilities and cultural zeitgeist of the time. There were, by my count, more than twenty-five other arcade titles on the market just featuring the word "space" in the title, with one of those already coming from Nintendo. And if you'd played any one since Space Invaders, you'd already know what to expect.

Space Fire Bird puts players in command of a fighter ship that moves along the base of the screen in a slight arc. Once you have parted with your coin a group of small ... space birds? ... spaceships? .. space butterflies? ... things swoop down towards you, deploying small red missiles that you must avoid while returning fire. Your spacecraft has one additional means of retaliation, however. On command you can activate your ship's force-field, which causes your ship to advance up the screen and destroy anything you manage to steer into. Think of it as a proto-starman, but one you must choose to utilise carefully as it is only available once per life.

Once you've dispatched a few of the whatever-they-are, you begin to encounter larger enemies that are most definitely birds. These take a couple more hits to take down, giving them a 'mini-boss' feel that softens the repetitiveness of your task. There's also an enemy counter which counts down from 50 whenever you destroy, or simply pass by, a target. After it reaches zero you move onto the next round which offers the same thing as the first, only with different enemy configurations. Still, it's nice to have a sense of progression to aim for other than the obligatory scoreboard.

A game can be repetitive yet still engaging, however, and Space Fire Bird fares a little better in this than some of its contemporaries. The spiraling descent patterns of the birds make them stimulating targets to track. Mowing down a screen of enemies with your force-field is satisfying, and the strategical element of choosing when to use it adds another layer of thought. The sprites are colourful, and the larger enemies are visually distinctive. The constant whirring noise made when enemies move is, to put it bluntly, intolerable, but sound was designed to play a much different role at this time. It wasn't about aural immersion, but about generating a distinct vocal tone that swelled and clashed against the noise of other machines, people and jukeboxes to form an intoxicating ambiance in which time could be lost as fast as the quarters.

...onto Space Demon, then, which I have tactically decided to include in this post because there's no way I could stretch it out into one of its own. And it is, essentially, just a reskin of Space Fire Bird - though the sources I've been searching through are so muddled I can't be sure if it was intended as a sequel or as an adaption for a foreign market.

The birds have been changed to demons, the...other things have been changed to...slightly different things, and the player's spaceship has been changed to a croquembouche. The force-field is slightly less powerful, in that it only takes you halfway up the screen, but other than that the two games are functionally identical. The only other thing to note is that Nintendo licensed out the development of this version to a smaller company known as Fortrek. Arguably this would make them one of their earliest "second party developers", if anyone ever felt compelled to argue over that.

So that's that then. Competent space shooters both, but nothing special. Nothing new. Nothing to encourage me out of the "review mode" this blog drifts into when there is little important to say. While Nintendo's early mechanical arcade games showed off some rather imaginative design, their eighties run of electronic arcade games has been disappointingly unoriginal thus far. And there is nothing I can see in this game to suggest their next effort will be any different.