It’s Been a Great Two Weeks for Shmup Fans

Summer is almost always the best time for game rereleases and retro revivals because the industry saves most of its major new games for the holiday season. Something like Gradius Origins will simply get more press and more awareness from the audience when it doesn’t have to fight major new would-be blockbusters for attention. There’s probably no major gaming website as editorially excited about Gradius Origins as us, and I doubt even we would be able to publish several different pieces about it in a week if it dropped the same month as Ghost of  Yotei, Battlefield 6, Pokémon Legends: Z to A, and Ninja Gaiden 4. Simply from an attention perspective, early August was about the smartest possible time to release all of these games.

For me, personally, all three games reached me in the waning days of an extended shmup-centric phase that I’ve been enjoying since May—or, truthfully, an up-and-down wave I’ve ridden since 1986 or so, that flared up once again with particular vigor about three months ago. I’ve juggled and double-fisted various installments of M2’s ShotTriggers series since the spring, filling in major gaps in my shooter past like Battle Garegga and ESP Ra.De. Games like Wheel World and Donkey Kong Bananza might’ve pulled me out of that zone a bit in July, but it was more than easy to slip back into it once Earthion hit my Steam Deck, and then to just seamlessly keep going into the familiar embrace of the Gradius and Toaplan games. 

There’s something more happening here, though—a broader cresting of shmup sentiment that transcends any single (old) man. Beyond the slowness of the season, the (less rare than you think) oddness of a new Genesis game coming out in 2025, or the historical importance of rediscovered old games (some of which, like the Toaplan ones, are “rediscovered” and rereleased in some form seemingly every year), mainstream interest in this genre appears to have grown to its largest level in a long while—perhaps since it first started to wane in the 1990s. More sites are covering shmups with some degree of regularity, and more writers have shown an affinity for writing not just about the genre’s history but its design standards and precepts, as well. 

It’s obvious to me why these games are worth playing, but again, I never fully stopped in the first place. But as games continue to grow more bloated and complicated, chasing an unattainable “forever game” dream built on constant microtransactions and games-as-a-service bunk, the appeal of the self-contained, well-defined, clearly structured and rigidly regulated nature of a good shoot ‘em up should be obvious. Add in the nostalgic factor—something that’s present even in brand-new shmups, even ones that aren’t consciously trying to channel a specific bygone era or hardware generation—and it’s understandable why some would find these generally difficult, largely dismissed as archaic games grounding and peaceful during an unsteady time. And after decades of major games becoming increasingly story-driven and besotted with malformed cinematic aspirations, the old-fashioned purity of shooting your way to a high score feels fresh and reinvigorating. 

Shmups are in the conversation again because of great releases like Earthion and Gradius Origins, but those great releases exist because shmups were always in a conversation, and an increasingly louder and more prominent one over the last few years. And now that the great shoot ‘em up games of August 2025 are boosting the revived genre to an even higher stature, we’ll hopefully see even more new releases in turn, keeping this foundational video game genre scrolling ever forward.

Editor-in-chief Garrett Martin writes about videogames, theme parks, pinball, travel, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.