Gyruss Upped the Awesome Level of Space Invaders By Playing In the Round

This early video arcade game wed the Space Invaders template to the mobility and dimension of Tempest for a more exciting shoot-em-up—set to Bach.

by Rich Watson

I first played video games in the mid-eighties, during junior high school. Enticed by alien adventures in cartoons and comic books, among the first games that attracted me were variations on Space Invaders: Galaxian, Phoenix, Galaga, Gorf. Kill the armada of alien spaceships before they kill you. Simple.

Then in 1983, a new space game provided a greater challenge: it allowed movement in three hundred sixty degrees.

Konami joins the arcade game field

The arcade shoot-em-up Gyruss was a product of the gaming company Konami. Today they’re known for worldwide smashes like Silent Hill, Dance Dance Revolution and Metal Gear, as well as the game adaptations of the manga Yu-Gi-Oh! 

In 1978 they entered the realm of coin-operated video games. The US first received their product a year later. Games such as Scramble and Frogger took off in the early eighties. 

Among Konami’s young developers during the eighties was Yoshiki Okamoto, from Japan’s Ehime Prefecture. In 1982, he designed Time Pilot, a game where the player travels through different time periods fighting enemy biplanes, helicopters, jets, and even UFOs. 

Fixed in one spot in the center of the screen, the hero ship could rotate in all directions. The background moved to give the sensation of flying around the screen. Though the ship could fly in front of and behind clouds and asteroids, the game felt two-dimensional.

Gyruss: three warps to Earth

The next year, 1983, Okamoto raised the ante. 

In a previous arcade game, Atari’s Tempest, the player rotated around the perimeter of a corridor fighting off creatures approaching from the inside. One could see them coming and shoot them. When the screen cleared, the player moved through the corridor onto the perimeter of a new one and the pattern continued, at a harder level.

Okamoto took this concept and transferred it to an outer space setting. In Gyruss, programmed by Toshio Arima with art design by Hideki Ooyama, the hero ship crosses the Milky Way from planet to planet via a series of “warps,” fighting the colorful alien ships to reach Earth. 

The hero ship’s fore section points inward. The stars hurtle past the ship towards the player, as if it was moving forward in space. Like Tempest, it provides dimension, a sense of near and far on a two-dimensional surface.

The aliens approach in formation, in waves from all sides, making a buzzing sound. They flock towards the “distance,” in the middle of the screen, to form a circle. In ones and twos, they target the hero ship and attack, like “advancing” to the foreground. The player combats them by circling the aliens and firing. Asteroids and rogue crafts provide additional obstacles and a chance for more points and greater firepower.

Reaching each planet in succession—Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and ultimately, Earth—the hero ship makes a descent sound like landing. A “challenging stage” furnishes an opportunity for target practice and extra points before the next series of warps to the next planet. 

After the challenging stage for Earth, the player runs the gauntlet all over again.

Score by Bach

In addition to the “in-the-round” format, Gyruss is remembered for its music. 

Composer Masahiro Inoue adapted a familiar melody for the game: Johann Sebastian Bach’s eighteenth-century piece “Toccata and Fugue in D minor,” a tune used in countless haunted house movies or anytime a composer sought a spooky atmosphere. (This article explains why it’s so unsettling.) 

Gyruss opens with an abbreviated version of this composition. Discreet audio circuits grant stereo sound.

Playing Gyruss

I discovered Gyruss at a local soda shop on a street in my neighborhood. It was the first video game I mastered. I played the game until I could “flip” it; that is, I got the highest possible score and then it reset to all zeroes as the game continued.

The in-the-round format fascinated me. I hadn’t seen Tempest, so moving in three hundred sixty degrees was a new concept. Galaxian or Gorf felt slow by comparison.

Flying through the Milky Way from planet to planet captured my imagination. Approaching Earth didn’t signal the climax, the way other games came to a definite conclusion. (Some home versions, like Nintendo, have a ending.) Reaching that stage, though, felt triumphant.

Once I learned the patterns, only perfect scores in the challenging stages would do. Body language was important to achieve this. Not worrying about dying meant I could relax more.

High score

The Iowa arcade Twin Galaxies is the official video game scorekeeper. The current Gyruss record is 70,736,950, set by Kim Kobke of Denmark in 2019. It took him sixty-two hours to achieve. It even inspired a documentary.

Okamoto’s later career

After Gyruss’ debut, a salary dispute arose between Okamoto and Konami. They parted ways. A year later, in 1984, Okamoto joined rival game company Capcom.

Among the games he produced for Capcom included Street Fighter II, one of the industry’s most successful games. At $10 billion in total revenue, it has become one of the highest-grossing video games ever. It spawned sequels, adaptations on multiple platforms, a toy line, several animated films and a live-action movie.

In 1997, Okamoto left Capcom to start first Flagship, then Game Republic in 2005. By 2012, he had switched from console games to mobile games such as Monster Strike, a bigger hit in Japan than in North America.

Gyruss, however, remains closest to my heart. Born of a simpler time in video games, it had just enough to make me imagine traversing the galaxy in a desperate quest to return home, to Earth.

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Have you played Gyruss?