TIGER HELI

TIGER-HELI ESTABLISHED TOAPLAN'S REPUTATION AS A SHOOTING GAME POWERHOUSE, EMERGING AS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT, INFLUENTIAL RELEASES THE GENRE HAS EVER SEEN. AND IT'S STILL NOT DONE. LATER THIS YEAR TIGER-HELI LANDS ON ATARI CONSOLES. BUT WHAT MADE IT SUCH A SPECIAL GAME?

- WILL FREEMAN

The announcement earlier this year that Toaplan's iconic shooter Tiger-Heli was being ported to the Atari 2600+, 7800, and 7800+ rather took the retro gaming world somewhat by surprise.

We've all grown rather used to seeing Toaplan's stable of releases migrate to new platforms, following the emergence of Tatsujin in 2017. The company, founded by its president and former Toaplan composer Masahiro Yuge, owns the rights to most of Toaplan's software library. The result? A great many classic shooters have been making their way to the PlayStation 4, Switch, PC, mobile and even the Evercade line. But a conversion to a console family with roots that go back to before Toaplan's own founding - in 2025? Few would have predicted that.

So why did Plaion pick Tiger-Heli out of all the icons deserving of a contemporary move to a classic console? No single title can take all the credit for what the shooting game form has become - and today it is a genre bristling with new releases, careful ports, and an abundance of vibrant, creative ideas. Sure - early works like Asteroids deserve much credit for enabling all that would follow. But those primitive titans of the medium's earliest days only whispered about what was to come. Tiger-Heli certainly isn't a genre progenitor, debuting in arcades in 1985. And nor is it as famed as peers of its time, such as Gradius and R-Type. Or, at least, that is true here in the West. But TigerHeli is deeply important - and perhaps one of the most influential shooters ever to grace an arcade cabinet. And, yes, with Plaion and Tatsujin both being owned by gaming giant Embracer Group, the porting project was relatively straightforward to orchestrate. But Tiger-Heli's story starts long before Plaion came on to the scene.