“There are only three sports,” Hemingway once said, before handily providing a list. “Bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”
It’s funny, because I sometimes feel the same way about my own personal preferences when it comes to games. There are only three genres that matter: puzzlers, driving and good old-fashioned 2D shooting. Everything else is mere frippery.
And, quite honestly, when I’m in the embrace of a shmup, smothered by floating clouds of bullets and twitching a tiny ship through impossibly large alien armadas, I could boil that down to one.
There’s something so brilliantly about the shmup. Maybe that’s because you can mark the key beats of early video game history by them: there’s Computer Space back at the very dawn, Space Invaders as they pushed into the mainstream, then all those fascinating splinters as the genre burrowed into its own niches. Gradius! Darius! Raiden! Zanac! Xevious!
In the abstract poetry of those names there’s something beautifully alien, too, which might explain another part of the genre’s appeal. These are things of pure fantasy, science fictions culled from half-glimpsed pulpy paperback covers. To play a good shmup is to be whisked away to some 2am otherworld that’s all inky black space coursed with blossoms of purple and pink.