The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Thundercade (a.k.a. Twin Formation)
Enjoy this wonderfully weird concept for an overhead shoot ‘em up involving a motorcycle with modular sidecars.
RELEASE DATE: 1987
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: SETA / Taito
BEST VERSIONS: Arcade
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Highly playable
I’d really love to know what drove the development of SETA’s 1987 arcade game Thundercade and whether it began life as just another helicopter game and was turned into a motorcycle game to make it stand out in the crowded arcades or whether it was truly envisioned as a motorcycle-centric shooter and common sense was just tossed out the door as the developers decided it made sense for a guy riding a bike would take down tanks, choppers, submarines, giant antlion heads, fighter jets and entire buildings with the guns mounted on his sidecars.
Whatever the case, the final result is kind of nuts, but thankfully, there’s more here than just a gimmick to talk about. Thundercade is a decent overhead scrolling vertical shooter with nice graphics and a surprisingly leisurely pace. It’s also a game where pretty much everything is destructible, where there’s no consistent sense of scale in the enemies you’ll face and where the best way to have a good time is to turn off your brain and just keep shooting.
The game begins with your ally, a B-7 Bomber, dropping your blue-shirted, motorcycle-riding hero off with the “Urgent Instruction” to “destroy enemies and the atomic power plant.” Again, the mind boggles at why a military bomber would drop off a guy with no armor and send him to try to get up close and personal with the nuclear facility he’s supposed to destroy, but as I mentioned, this is not a game for thinking people. Your motorcycle is pitifully equipped with a single canon that shoots directly ahead of you, but your bomber helpfully takes out a few initial buildings and reveals a sidecar you can pick up and attach to either side of your bike. As you continue to play, you can get additional sidecars with different cannons (some shoot sideways, others shoot forward) as well as more bombing attacks you can call down to lay waste to the battlefield.
On the first level, you’re driving slowly through a city, battling humans who you can run over if you’d like as well as tanks and helicopters that are only slightly larger than you. You can use the power of your bomber or your sidecar weapons to take down any buildings, trees or food stalls that get in your way, sometimes revealing new power-ups. Midway through the stage, the top of a submarine appears and starts shooting at you, but it’s toast after some sustained fire and a bombing run or two. You then proceed down a surface street while tanks shoot at you from the highway above, eventually coming to a downtown area where you cross a bridge, fight a mega-tank and then proceed on into the desert, which is actually the second stage.
Though the game is broken into four distinct regions, with a woodland area and the nuclear fortress rounding things out, Thundercade plays as one continuous scrolling map, and this is both a good and a bad thing since it keeps the action moving forward but barely gives you a moment to catch your breath. While the first two stages each have a midboss and a final boss, the woodland area gives up on both concepts entirely, and the final stage has you face two submarines, a crazy gauntlet of rocket-launchers that pop up out of the ground, and finally, a set of nuclear silos where infantry seem to have stacked barrels to create pillboxes for a hilarious final stand where they pop out and take potshots at you. Then, the screen flashes and you’re off to rendezvous with your B-7 bomber while a mushroom cloud forms in the background as the credits roll.
One reason why I think this game might have been a helicopter shooter originally is because everything moves so slowly. But another is that the developers added in a very poorly-implemented jump mechanic that’s triggered by certain terrain and which can have your motorcycle hang in the air for several seconds or even ascend to the tops of buildings. And yet this mechanic does nothing to change the gameplay; you can still lose a sidecar or die while you’re airborne, and the effect is only really practically there for explaining why you’re able to go over spots on the map you shouldn’t be able to.
Despite all this craziness, however, Thundercade manages to be a fun experience simply because it’s such a white-knuckle shooter. The enemies swarm the screen and keep you really busy both dodging and shooting, and you have to be strategic about which sidecars you take on or else you’ll have a hard time clearing the screen. The graphics are decent for the time, and while the music and sound aren’t anything special, the game provides about a half hour of fairly fun shooting with checkpoint-based continues available.
Thundercade is definitely best in its original arcade form, but it’s yet another game published by Taito that has not been re-released in a compilation for North American audiences despite being released as a coin-op cabinet in the market. You’ll have to play it via an arcade emulator if you want to check it out for yourself. There is, however, an NES adaptation from Micronics and American Sammy which is pretty much a direct translation of the arcade game if you don’t mind the downgraded graphics. It’s not as endearing as the original, but it is easier to play legally.
As Our Series Continues…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 2. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!