No less than Haruomi Hosono, noted Japanese experimental musician, released an electronic album in 1984 titled Video Game Music. Yet it is clear that this loop resonated with people. If I am entirely honest, I think a lot of my own complicated feelings toward Xevious stem from the music.
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While I will give her full marks for her strident, Star Wars-esque fanfare to commence proceedings, the actual background music of Xevious is basically a shrill four second loop of arpeggiated treble blips with an eight step steady downward syncopated bass walk. This is another Yuriko Keino joint, hot off the heals from her more understated work on Pac & Pal. The music here also warrants discussion, despite my intense distaste of said. Andor Genesis is a real rotten bastard and I'd be lying if I said I've ever actually beaten the damn thing. Oh, and another NamCompendium First: this was the company's first game to feature a boss fight. I think I know where to put it in this series, and you'll want to stay tuned for that entry because I love everything about it. I've been waiting to talk about UGSF, seeing as we've already covered a handful of games therein.
Without really getting into details, it is incredible that this fictional setting has never intersected with Namco's retroactively assembled UGSF fiction. That Xevious would launch an entire line of sequels and spinoff games was unknowable at the time, but even without that foreknowledge it is still a fairly evocative game to play. Add in a few invisible towers to bomb (denoted by the cursor changing from blue to red while passing over them) and you get some dubious mystery content as well. Credits to Įndou's strange mix of futuristic space craft, combining traditional sprite work and fully pre-rendered sprites (a NamCompendium First!), set over an earth-like landscape decked in Nazca lines, all blend to create something alien and utterly unique. It was this commitment to a fiction that probably lead to him personally designing and drawing the enemies for the game as well as handling programming. He followed a principe that would later be utilized in the Dungeon World tabletop roleplaying game, namely "Name every NPC." Every enemy in Xevious has some lunatic name and factors into an elaborate fiction concocted by Endou himself. Endou wanted a world with a sense of mystery, both through the fiction and theming of the game as well as the mechanics. His vision was wildly ambitious compared to what had been previously attempted in the young shoot em up genre. Endou is credited with programming Xevious, but it is primarily his design vision that has his name so tightly bound to the game. While the credits list for Xevious is another nightmare to assemble, there is one name to which the title shall be forever bound: Masanobu Endou, making his premiere here on the NamCompendium. Whitehead for sharing slides of his research) His own research has it that Xevious was predated as a vertical scrolling shooter by Mission-X, Zoar (both by Data East), and Funky Bee (by Orca), which makes Xevious merely the first vertical shooter that anybody remembers at all. Whitehead does make the case that Space Invaders is indeed the first shmup, and that the themes of Taito's breakout hit (a lone hero avatar set in an abstract, decontextualized battle with inherent xenophobic overtones) have remained at the core of the genre since 1978. Jim Whitehead of UC Santa Cruz to clarify this subject. Thankfully, being an academic employee who defers to expert opinions, I can fall back on the research of Dr. Indeed, what distinguishes a game like Xevious from Space Invaders?īeyond the fairly important quibble of fixed horizontal movement at the bottom of a screen, there are several taxonomical considerations at play here. But is that really the case? What distinguishes Xevious from a game like, for instance, Galaxian? That title a steady parallax simulation of a star field in the background, creating the sense of forward movement through space while fighting a hoard of enemies. It is tempting to rush headlong and claim that Xevious is the first vertical scrolling shoot 'em up. What better way to put a capstone on that year, than release one more barn burner? Xevious is quite the colossus, and has a rich history of ports (and port-adjacent things).
1982 was a banner year for Namco, and I've endeavored to make the case that it represented the close of a golden age for the company.
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