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You have a choice of two male pilots and three female gunners, each named after metalworking objects. Now THIS is how you begin a shooting game! Once in the sky you can see in the background your town in ruins below, with the first boss’s mighty airship looming above.

You are shown steering past bystanders on the runway, taking off just as it breaks. As the game starts, with the Engrish taunt “Are you ready set? We started on a trip to hell,” the view cuts to your player’s ship in a hangar that is burning down fast. Each of the five lead children have an inexperienced yet determined look about them that will charm players as they select their ship style, while the portraits of the evil boss elders will intimidate players with their baleful scowls. De., but there is just something about this game in particular that makes the characters seem to jump out of the screen. There are some similarities to his drawing work on games like Batsugun and ESP Ra. Cave’s Junya “Joker Jun” Inoue provided the game with its fabulously stylized look and character designs. Hot B’s Genesis/Megadrive shooter Steel Empire adapted the steampunk style 9 years earlier, but Progear carves out its own unique look, along with some inspiration from anime such as Miyazaki’s “ Castle in the Sky“. There are also several elegant looking locomotives, and trains always make good shoot-em-ups even better. The background of Victorian-style news clippings with wartime headlines, along with the scattering of biplane and zeppelin enemies, pull you into the game’s anachronistic setting. What makes Progear stand out to this day, first and foremost, is the beautiful steampunk style. While many within the company don’t consider the game a success, it’s still a favorite among shooter fans for its excellent presentation and fun gameplay. The result was Progear in 2001, licensed out to Capcom for its CPS2 arcade hardware. It was unclear, then, just how well Cave’s style of covering the screen in bullets would work in a horizontally oriented game how can you keep those trademark patterns challenging and tight, when even the most trained eye only perceives them moving across a horizon? Nevertheless, there was enough interest within Cave to give it a try. To paraphrase: “In vertical scrolling, everything is obvious… you can see straight away if you are going to get hit or not, but in horizontal scrolling, it’s impossible to see properly if you are in the path of a bullet.” Playing a vertically oriented shooter in the arcade, particularly on one of the Japanese style “candy cab” sit-down cabinets, it’s easy to see what he’s talking about: bullets appear to get closer as they scroll down the screen, nearer to the player.

In Game One’s excellent mini-documentary on arcade shooters “ Japon: Histoire du Shooting Game“, Tsuneki Ikeda of Cave sheds a little light on why it took Cave six years to approach a horizontally oriented shoot-em-up.