Toaplan Arcade Collection Volume 1 & 2 Launches August 14

The latest arcade resurrection from Clear River Games isn’t a remake — it’s a collection. In fact it’s two collections. Toaplan Arcade Collection Volume 1 & 2 are headed for all modern consoles in a week’s time; a repackaging of the Toaplan library.

What did Toaplan make for arcades? Shoot-em-ups, and lots of ’em! The majority of these involve flying a ship through space and blasting everything in sight before it can blast you first. If you’re unfamiliar with the Toaplan name, you know of at least one of their titles: Zero Wing, whose botched translation became the source of one of the Internet’s first memes. (We’re told that translation has been left intact in Vol. 2.)

Each collection contains eight Toaplan shooters, enhanced with the expected modern bells and whistles like leaderboards, screen filters, a quick save, and other quality-of-life extras. Volume 1 has Tiger-Heli, Flying Shark, Twin Cobra, Fire Shark, Out Zone, FixEight, Dogyuun and Batsugun, while Volume 2 contains Slap Fight, Truxton, Hellfire, Twin Hawk, Zero Wing, Vimana,, Truxton II and Grind Stormer.

Clear River says while playing you should keep an eye out for Pipiru, the Toaplan mascot. Usually Japanese developers of the 1980s would put their mascots front and center, but Pipiru was hidden in many Toaplan games. We won’t tell you how to find him (mainly because Clear River won’t tell us either) but he’s there, waiting to be discovered.

Toaplan Arcade Collection Volume 1 & 2 will be released for Playstation 5, Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and Xbox Series S|X August 14.