Forgotten Worlds, titled in Japan, is a side-scrolling shooter video game by Capcom, originally released as a coin-operated arcade game in 1988. It is notable for being the first title released by Capcom for their CP System arcade game hardware.
Plot
Set in the 29th century, an evil god known as Bios has destroyed most of the Earth, turning it into a desolate wasteland known as the Dust World. Two nameless supersoldiers are created by the people to defeat Bios and the eight evil gods who serve him.
Gameplay
Forgotten Worlds can be played by up to two players simultaneously. The player controls a flying muscle-bound soldier armed with a rifle with unlimited ammo. The Player 1 character is equipped with a long-range automatic rifle, while Player 2 has a short-range wide shot. The controls in the original coin-op version consist of an eight-way joystick for moving the character in the air while flying and a unique rotatable button known as the "roll switch". Rotating the switch left or right allows the player to adjust their character's aim in one of sixteen directions, while pressing it causes the player character to shoot his gun. This allows for the player to move their character anywhere while keeping their aim in one direction. Pressing the switch rapidly will cause the character to perform a "megacrush" attack which will destroy all on-screen enemies, but at the expense of a portion of their vitality gauge.
The player character is accompanied by a satellite module orbiting near him that will provide backup firepower every time the player fires their gun. Like the main character, the satellite can also be rotated with the roll switch. Rotating the character while firing will only rotate the aim of the satellite, while rotating the character without firing will not only rotate the satellite's aim, it will also move its relative position around the player.
The player can obtain blue-colored coins known as Zenny from defeating enemies throughout the game. Zenny is used as currency to obtain new power-up items from shops located at certain points in each stage. When the player enters an item shop, they are given a choice of the items available and a limited time to make any purchase they wish. These items consist primarily of new weapons for the satellite module, but also include a health kit to restore lost vitality, armor that allows the player to sustain additional damage, and even tips on how to defeat the boss awaiting at the end of the current stage.
Forgotten Worlds consists of nine stages each with its own boss. The player will lose if their vitality gauge runs out, but will be given a chance to continue.
Development
The game took two years to develop, with a production budget of and four megabytes of sprite data. The game started off as a regular side-scrolling shooter, but Yoshiki Okamoto wanted a more imaginative game. During development, Capcom tried to make the game easier to play, having received criticism about how hard it was to dodge enemy projectiles in previous games. As this was the first game to use the CPS-1, Capcom tried to fully maximize its software capabilities. The game did not generate enough income upon its release due to large numbers of shooter games in the market and there were increased expenses due to a shortage of chips needed for the CPS-1 boards.
Home versions
Forgotten Worlds was first ported to various home computers in Europe by U.S. Gold in 1989. Versions were produced for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, and IBM-compatible PC. These versions of the game were developed by Arc Developments. The development team had four months to make the conversions. Every graphical frame was digitised directly from the arcade version's screen using a DigiView Gold device and stored the data on an Amiga 500 computer. The God of War was hand sketched, redrawn on the computer and colored with Deluxe Paint, although the mirroring function saved time. Even the shop scene was hand sketched from scratch.
All the home computer version required a joystick controller in order to be played and could not be played with the keyboard only (with the exception of the IBM PC, ZX Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC versions). The player rotated the character in these versions by holding the fire button while pushing the joystick left or right. In the Spectrum sales charts, it was number two, behind Robocop, which was number one every month for most of the year.