Flying Up and Shooting

The arcade scene was still fairly new when Xevious hit the scene. Mechanical games, like pinball, had given way to more digital affairs, and arcade cabinets started showing up everywhere. It wasn’t just arcades but also bowling alleys, mini-golf courses, restaurants, pizza joints, movie theaters, and more. If there was a space where kids (and adults) could show up, where their quarters could be sucked from them, three minutes of gameplay at a time, then you know the owners of the establishment were going to get arcade cabinets in there.

A popular type of game was the vertical shooter. Titles like Namco’s Galaxian, Atari’s Centipede, and Shin Nihon Kikaku Ozma Wars set a certain standard. A ship, fixed the bottom of the screen, forced to fire upwards as wave after wave of enemies came flying down towards them. If they got hit, they’d die, and they’d have to move on to their next life. Run out of lives (something the player could do but the enemy forces never did) and it was game over, please insert another quarter to keep playing. The mechanics were simple, but addictive, and for three minutes of game play (which these games were engineered to provide to give maximum profit for the arcades without making the players feel like they were ripped off) players got all kinds of new experiences.

And then along came Xevious, a game that took the template of the vertical shooter and completely redefined it. No longer was your ship set on a fixed horizontal line, instead letting you fly freely around the zone. No longer were you in a single sector of space, or some single room of terrain; now you were flying along, zipping north along the countryside as it moved beneath you. This was a game that made you feel more like you were in control of a ship that was actually on a mission, actually fighting the hordes of enemies as they moved towards you. Xevious was something new.

Functionally if you’d played a vertical shooter you could understand the basics of Xevious. You had your joystick which moved you around (and you’d quickly realize you could move in any direction along the flat plan), and then you had two fire buttons. One controlled your basic pellet gun, shooting your main weapon north towards the enemies. The other controls your bomb chamber; as you moved around a little reticule would follow, just ahead of your ship. Wherever that fixed reticule was aiming, that was where your bombs would land. Two weapons, one ship, against all the hordes of the invading alien fleet.

The two weapons were integral to the gameplay, and, along with the free movement and scrolling background, they were essential to the Xevious experience. They were what made the game stand out from all the vertical shooters that came before. The basic pellet gun traveled along the same plane as the player’s ship. Enemies that would fly down the screen would get hit by the pellets, and that was your way of managing their numbers. But Xevious had two planes you had to manage, air and ground, and the only way to take out ground attackers was your slower, more deliberate, bombs. They couldn’t be hit by your pellet gun, you had to use the bombs.

The game starts off easily enough, letting you get settled into the experience. Your first enemies are little o-shaped ships that will actively avoid your gun. Move in front and they’ll juke to the side, attempting to stay alive. They seem easy enough to manage on their own, but once other enemies come into play, these little o-ships can prove to be a hindrance since they’ll dodge potentially right into the path you wanted to take. And these are the easiest enemies you have to manage in the game.

From here more enemies, of different types and difficulties, will arrive. Ships that will dodge towards you, ships that home in, ships that first, ships that use stealth to try and surprise you. And that doesn’t even take into account ground forces, from firing surface-to-air guns, tanks, boats, and more. After a few minutes you’ll suddenly find yourself swarmed by enemies, multiple shots flying all around you, all as the forces try to overwhelm you and take you out. And then sometimes you’ll even get floating walls, impenetrable and oblivious to your attacks, getting in the way as you’re trying to manage your combat. It becomes a lot.

Xevious also brought in bosses, larger ships that would move along, forcing you to take them out before you could move on to the next waves of combat. These would have multiple surface-to-air installations, all firing at you while you had to bomb them repeatedly while also managing any other enemies that would come on screen. These are hard, frenetic fights that force you to recalibrate how you played the game on the fly. You might have ignored many of the ground encampments before, but in these larger boss fight scenarios you couldn’t; they had to be taken out so you had to be good at dealing with ground forces.

While Namco did a lot for the genre with Xevious, the game did still lack some features that would soon become mainstays of the format. For starters, there weren’t any power-ups of any kind. While you did have your two main weapons, that was all that you could get. There was no way to upgrade either weapon in any way. No enemy drops, no flying power-ups, nothing. That’s nice in one regard since you could never find yourself in a place where the enemies wiped you out, destroying your whole armament reserve, leaving you with nothing when you spawned in the next time. At the same time, though, while the hordes of alien ships got harder and harder, there was no way for you to boost yourself and rise to the occasion outside of basic twitch gameplay.

Heck, in comparison to even Galaga, where an enemy mothership could steal one of your vessels, and if you were smart you could get it back, doubling your firepower, Xevious feels pretty barebones. Even having one more ship to double your firepower (at the risk of a wider target you have to manage) could have made the game more interesting and playable. There’s that one little bit of an upgrade path that’s missing here, and you feel it if you’ve played anything that came later in the genre.

Not that Xevious is a bad game. It was ground-breaking and did something no other game at the time was doing. Once you played this it was hard to go back to Galaxian (good as that game was) because that game felt pretty minimalist by comparison. But Xevious was foundational, and that meant that the next games to come along would take what Xevious did and would then iterate on it, adding in new styles, new weapons, new modes, and more. You couldn’t get to those without Xevious, giving it a special place in the pantheon of gaming, but like going back to Galaxian after Xevious, once you played something even more evolved, Xevious struggled to stand out anymore…