Ultimate Guide: Gemini Wing
This is our kind of coin-op. No plot, just swarms of oversized alien insects to exterminate. Retro Gamer grabs a can of bug spray and takes on the arcade shooter from Tecmo that generated a real buzz
Everything you need to know about Tecmo’s insanely colourful shoot-’em-up
Power-ups have always been integral to arcade shoot-’em-ups. With your tiny craft coming under relentless attack, you couldn’t cut a swathe through the enemy waves using your peashooter-esque standard weapon could you? So developers introduced power-ups to readdress the balance and there have been some memorable examples. Moon
Cresta and its docking system was an early pioneer, and this was quickly followed by Gradius’ selectable ‘Power Meter’ and of course the detachable ‘Force’ orb from R-type.
With so many shooters hitting the market in the late Eighties, it was typically innovations in power-up mechanics that set them apart. And that was precisely Gemini Wing’s gambit. This was a fairly typical vertically scrolling shooter in which you were pitted against hordes of invading critters over seven stages. There was differing terrain, end-of-level bosses and co-op support for two players – one blue ship, one red. It was standard stuff.
The power-up system was pretty clever, however. The five special weapons (plus speed-ups and 1UPS) were held in floating spheres called ‘gunballs’. These were released by killing certain enemies, notably The Bringer creatures who were laden with multiple gunballs. Once collected, the gunballs chained themselves to the rear of your ship like a tail of mass destruction, and they could be activated in the order they were collected. The trick was to try and save your gunballs for the gnarly, larger-than-life bosses, as trying to topple them with your puny peashooter was a tough ask. Thankfully if you did get shot down, your gunballs would scatter, giving you a brief window to gather them back up.
In another neat touch, if you had more than three gunballs, the other player could take some for their own. This was introduced to encourage sharing, but for some players (such as your average food hog in Gauntlet, you know the type) it was mandatory to wind up a friend by nipping in and nicking their hard-earned supplies.
gunballs, “If you had other more than three take some the for their player own” could
That aside, the power-up system received praise in the gaming mags that reviewed new arcade releases. “On first appearances it’s just another bog ordinary vertically scrolling shoot-’em-up, albeit a reasonably classy one,” commented Nick Kelly in the January 1988 issue of Commodore User. What he felt lifted it from ‘ordinary’ to ‘excellent’ were the gunballs. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Gemini Wing becomes a massive cult hit.” Steady on, Nick (although we can see where you were coming from).
Ciaran Brennan from Your Sinclair also commented on the ‘straightforward’ gameplay, but was full of praise for the ‘breathtaking’ graphics. “Where this one does score is in the visual department, with stunning graphics and backgrounds that have
to be seen to be believed. I can recommend this one highly, especially as a two-player game.” The graphics were indeed fantastic. There were no twinkling star fields here, rather finely-detailed backgrounds that used parallax scrolling to add a sense of depth (witness the cloud cover breaking apart to reveal the canyon in the opening stage). Surprisingly the game’s hardware was a modest Z80 setup, although there’s clearly some clever video trickery going on. The same setup was used to power Silkworm, Tecmo’s popular sidescrolling shooter that was released shortly after.
Gemini Wing was issued as a conversion kit for vertically orientated JAMMA cabs, so it likely replaced a dusty old game in your local arcade sometime after its debut in October 1987. Two years later Virgin Games would publish and licence Gemini Wing for home computers.
For the conversion job Virgin commissioned Yorkshire-based Imagitec Design to develop versions for the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64, as well as the Amiga and Atari ST. Imagitec was best known for developing
Bloody Valley and Butcher Hill for Gremlin, plus bits of undistinguished conversion work for various publishers. Despite its less than stellar record, the Imagitec team delivered decent versions for all platforms. The September 1989 issue of The Games Machine magazine rounded up all of the versions (bar the CPC release which missed the deadline), giving 62% to the C64, 69% to the Spectrum and 71% to both the ST and Amiga. Reviewer Mark Caswell summarised that it was “one of the better examples” in the current crop of arcade conversions.
The 8-bit versions were all single-player – although a preview of the C64 game in Zzap!64 issue 52 reveals that it initially featured co-op play, with screenshot evidence, but it was dropped for some reason (the mag later awarded the solo experience 65%). Thankfully the 16-bit versions did support two players, but none of the versions attempted to recreate the parallax scrolling from the arcade, which led to some unfavourable comparisons with the recently released and allround excellent Xenon 2: Megablast.
We don’t know how the full-price release sold, but we can get a decent idea of its popularity by looking at the published sales figures for its budget re-release on the Mastertronic Plus label. Across all formats it sold 36,000 copies, which is actually quite low for a budget title (for comparison Silkworm, that other Tecmo shooter which was also licensed by Virgin Games, sold 135,000 copies when issued on Mastertronic Plus). If you were wondering
about the format split for the budget re-release of Gemini Wing, it was C64 34%, CPC 23%, Spectrum 20%, Amiga 15%, and ST 8%.
The game was later released on two further platforms. The MSX received a very lazy port of the Spectrum version which was an embarrassment in the face of the Konami and Compile shooters available for the system. Far superior was the Sharp X68000 version which was converted by Sacom and released in
1990. As you would expect from this powerful system the version was arcade perfect – parallax scrolling and all.
And that was it for Gemini Wing. There were no console versions, and more surprising still it hasn’t been included on any retro compilation. You’d have thought it would have been a shoe-in for the 11-game Tecmo Classic Arcade collection released for Xbox in 2005, but no, it wasn’t included. And neither was Silkworm, yet Swimmer and Senjyo were. Strange.
Gemini Wing isn’t a forgotten title but it’s clearly one that’s fallen between the cracks. What better excuse to dig it out and revisit it now, particularly if you’re partial to a little bug blasting? Just don’t be stealing our gunballs, pal.