Toaplan

From vgmrips
Toaplan
Founded 1984
Defunct 1994 (most of the IPs owned by Tatsujin)
Major Products Shooters
Key People Tatsuya Uemura (former Crux / Toaplan composer / programmer / director / Toaplan president)

Masahiro Yuge (former Toaplan composer)
Osamu Ohta (former Toaplan composer)

Company page in vgmrips Toaplan
Company website Toaplan Japan


Toaplan Co., Ltd. (ja: 東亜プラン), often called as Toa Plan or Toa Kikaku, was a video game company, founded in 1984, at Japan. The company was founded by ex-Crux and ex-Orca people.

History

In 1984, just when Gyrodine was released, Crux was going about to being bankrupt. Various people from Crux moved out from them and created a new company, which is Toaplan. The first game that Toaplan was ever developed, is Jongou (en:Mahjong King) from SNK.

In 1985, Toaplan developed Performan, making it the first game on the Toaplan 8-bit arcade board. In the same year, Toaplan developed Tiger-Heli, one of the first shooters in the world to have a Mega-Bomb.

In 1986, Taito turned Toaplan as one of their "second-parties", such as Visco, Hot-B, and Kaneko. So, Toaplan developed games exclusively to Taito until 1989.

In 1989, Toaplan developed and published Zero Wing, one of most known in shooters in the world. The European translation of the MD version also generated a Internet Meme, making the phrase All your base are belong to us as one of the most known Engrish phrases in the world.

In 1990, Toaplan developed and published Snow Bros., a platform game, which was ported to a variety of consoles. In the same year, Toaplan started to both develop and publish games for the Mega Drive.

In 1994, Toaplan developed Snow Bros. 2 to Hanafram, and went bankrupt. Toaplan spun off various companies: Cave, Raizing, Gazelle and Takumi. Cave is the most successful company of the four mentioned above.

In 2017-05, Masahiro Yuge founded TATSUJIN Co., Ltd., which holds the rights of almost every Toaplan game, minus Jongou, Performan and Jongkyou.

In 2019, TATSUJIN Co., Ltd. allowed Sega to release the Mega Drive ports of Slap Fight and Snow Bros. for the Chinese and Korean versions of Mega Drive Mini. On the same year, M2 teams up with TATSUJIN Co., Ltd. to bring their titles to home systems and smartphones. Exceptions are Mahjong Sisters and Enma Daioh.

Arcade boards