Earthion
From Sega Retro
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| Earthion | |||||||||||||||
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| System(s): Sega Mega Drive | |||||||||||||||
| Publisher: Limited Run Games (US,CA) SUPERDELUXE GAMES (JP) | |||||||||||||||
| Developer: Ancient | |||||||||||||||
| Sound driver: MDSDRV | |||||||||||||||
| Genre: Shooting | |||||||||||||||
| Number of players: 1 | |||||||||||||||
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Earthion is an upcoming aftermarket shooting game developed by Ancient primarily for the Sega Mega Drive. Physical MD versions will be published by SUPERDELUXE GAMES in Japan and by Limited Run Games in North America. The game will also get a 16:9 version for modern platforms.
Earthion is published under the label YKGGG, a brand name covering all the retro-style games developed at Ancient. If Earthion meets success, Ancient will go on the venture of releasing video games designed for retro consoles.[1] A separate version of the game for Arcade was confirmed by Ancient and published by exA-Arcadia, which features a new, exclusive mode that will not be available in the Mega Drive version.[2]
Contents
Story
Gameplay
This game is a side-scrolling shoot-'em-up.
History
Probably pumped up by the great success of the 2018-2019 concerts Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima performed during the Red Bull Music Festival and the warm welcome of Streets of Rage 4 in 2020, Ancient looked at the prospects of releasing retro-style games. As professional aftermarket games have become a thing during the 2010's, as convenient tools are available to ease the development of games on authentic retro consoles, and as Koshiro's name is strongly tied to the Mega Drive in the West, Ancient obviously started with the development of a new Mega Drive game.
The unveiling of this project was done through a Twitter / X message posted on 30 November 2022 by Yuzo Koshiro, the founder and CEO of Ancient Corp.[3] All communication around the game was mainly done this way, through Koshiro personal tweets, along presentations during video game conventions like Tokyo Game Show 2023, BitSummit 2024 in Kyoto and PAX West 2024 in Seattle.
The title has been unveiled on 16 June 2023, with Koshiro explaining that it was inspired and took after some of the most beloved shooters like Gradius and Darius. So, by following the same pattern of having 5 morae (グラディウス gu-ra-di-u-su and ダライアス da-ra-i-a-su), the game also got a 5-mora title (アーシオン a-a-shi-o-n).[4]
As Koshiro promised to at least do physical releases on Mega Drive cartridges, Ancient signed with SUPERDELUXE GAMES[5] and Limited Run Games for physical distribution in Japan and North America. Limited Run Games hinted at the fact that physical releases on modern platforms may also be a work in progress.[6]
Production credits
Promotional material
Physical scans
Technical information
The game has been developed using SGDK,[7] the open source toolkit by Stéphane Dallongeville, and MDSDRV, the open source sound driver by Ian Karlsson.[8]
As most audio professionals, Koshiro nowadays uses a PC with digital audio workstations and virtual studio technology (VST) plugins, versatile and convenient tools that let a musician create music quickly. To make music tracks and sfx for Earthion, Koshiro used the MAmidiMEmo VST plugin to compose MD / Genesis songs and create YM2612 sound banks. The song data were then imported into mmlgui and tweaked to get the full potential of the YM2612 sound chip.[9] Although Koshiro did try to use his own old tools from back in the days (Mucom88 on a NEC PC-88), his newer toolset on Windows loads much faster and is much easier to use.[10]