Toaplan Co. Ltd (とうあプラン in Japan, and sometimes spelt Toa Plan) was a Japanese company that developed mainly shooting games for arcade use from 1984 to 1994. The company was headquartered in Shimizu, Suginami-ku, Tokyo. The development department was sometimes located in Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku, Tokyo, and sometimes in Shinjuku 3-chome, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo.
About The Company And It's History[]
After Orca went bankrupt, the software team that had been working at the company established Clax. When Clax went bankrupt again due to financial difficulties, some of the staff moved to Toa Planning, which was a distributor of arcade games, and created a game software division, which is said to be the reason for the birth of Toaplan. Toa Planning itself was established in April 1979. The original president was Yoshiyuki Kiyomoto, who retired in 1992 and was replaced by Taizo Hayashi of Comet, who also served as president.
The company restarted from an environment of game development in a condominium room, initially producing games as a subcontractor for other manufacturers, mainly Taito. The success of Twin Cobra (Kyukyoku Tiger in Japan) raised the company's name recognition, and once the development environment was ready, the company began releasing games under its own brand, starting with Hellfire. Taito continued to handle distribution.
The "Flying Tigers" series, which included "Tiger Heli" and "Flying Shark (called Sky Shark in the US, and Hishou Zame in Japan)" laid the foundation for the vertical scrolling shooter genre. With the advent of the shooting boom, the company produced a series of titles such as "Truxton II (Tatsujin Oh in Japan)" that appealed to players with a high level of difficulty, triggering a boom in high difficulty shooting games. However, this was one of the reasons for the decline in the number of regular players.
Toward the end of the period, the company released "Batsugun" and other action games, which were designed to appeal to beginners, instead of focusing exclusively on shooting games, which had been the company's forte. However, at a time when the popularity of video games was shifting to fighting games, it was difficult to say that the company was well accepted in the market.
The company went bankrupt in 1994, with its main staff establishing a few offshot companies, namely Gazelle, Raizing, Takumi and Cave, which continued to produce arcade games such as "DonPachi" and others. The company is often mentioned along with SNK, Data East, Compile, and Psikyo as representative of the many arcade game makers that disappeared from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. The rights to Toaplan's intellectual properties were acquired by Tatsujin Co. Ltd., a company founded by Masahiro Yuge.