Back in 1993, a company by the name of A.I. was working on a new vertical scrolling shooting game called Wing Force. Atlus would publish the game but as things worked out, the game was never released and thought lost – until now.
On the Shmups Forum they detail more about how the game was found along with what it is. We were going to run this story last week but waited for the game to show up in action, which you can see below. It was re-discovered when it appeared on Yahoo! Japan Auctions in December, which led to a bidding war with user ‘Shou‘ landing the winning bid at ¥301,000 (by today’s calculation, $2567USD). That isn’t too surprising, a cheap prototype is a rare breed.
Despite that investment, the winner did what he promised and the ROMs for the game have been copied and released online so it can play in MAME. The game runs on “almost identical” hardware as the A.I./Atlus shooter Blazeon although I am not sure how common that hardware is to be able to burn the ROMs and run it in a real cabinet (like was done with Sega’s Hammer Away). As you can see from the footage here, it looks somewhat like Raiden, with some additions like the ‘Boss Score’ and extra graphical details.
What are your thoughts on this find?
