Technosoft's Thunder Force series may not have the widespread fame that Gradius, R-Type or Darius have achieved, but it remains a favourite with fans of the shmup genre, and here at Time Extension, we sincerely hope that the franchise returns in some shape or form soon.
One of the most celebrated entries in the series is Thunder Force V, which initially launched on Saturn before coming to PS1 as well. VGDensetsu reminded us today that the game's origins actually predate Sega's 32-bit console; it was initially in development on the Mega Drive.
This news was initially revealed by former Technosoft staffer Naosuke Arai, who spoke to gaming historian and regular Time Extension contributor John Szczepaniak in The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol.3:
"The game actually started development on the Mega Drive. It ended up being released on the Saturn and then the PlayStation, but we'd made three Thunder Force games on the Mega Drive, so we wanted to continue that legacy by developing Thunder Force V on the platform as well. We wanted to make it a little more exciting than previous titles, with pseudo-3D graphics that used something similar to polygons, but it just ended up looking really cheap. After how good Thunder Force IV had looked, we just couldn't release a follow-up that looked like that. Then the Saturn came along and we figured, well, we could probably pull it off for that. We never finished the game on Mega Drive, of course. I think we only made the first level. It was playable, but no one was happy with it. The 3D graphics were pre-rendered, not real-time."
Arai thinks this early prototype still exists, and is "locked away in an archive somewhere." He adds:
"By 1999 we were backing up all our data on CDs, including Mega Drive code, so it's definitely out there somewhere. Probably. I don't know if any data survived from the cassette tape eras, but we were definitely backing things up by the Mega Drive era."
Graphic designer Yōichi Kubo, who worked on both Thunder Force IV and Thunder Force V, has posted on social media about the cancelled Mega Drive version, too. According to VGDensetsu, he says that development took place between 1993 and 1994, with only a single level being created:
"The action begins on a moon with a golden sky, then the player’s ship crosses the stratosphere, revealing a planet of ice. Then comes the boss, a new version of Gargoyle (already present in Thunder Force III and IV) in non-textured 3D. The 3D elements were drawn using software running on X68000, the same software that seems to have been used for the game’s intro, with a fairly low resolution. As with the Saturn version, and unlike Thunder Force IV, there was no vertical scrolling was no longer possible."
Speaking on social media with Kubo over a decade ago, Twitter user @Mazin__ revealed that they had seen the game in video form when it was known as Thunder Force 3D. Also noted by VGDensetsu is the fact that developer UMMO_CHAN shared a black-and-white printout of some of the game’s sprites in 2018, but they've sadly deleted their account.
Could we ever see this mysterious and little-known prototype in action? Arai told John Szczepaniak that it probably still exists, and will have been passed on to Japanese pachinko manufacturer Twenty-One in 2001 when it purchased the company. In 2016, Twenty-One sold its entire video game library to Sega, so one would assume the prototype was part of the deal. Hopefully, one day it will emerge so we can see just what Thunder Force V might have looked like on 16-bit hardware.