Toaplan’s Truxton Is Back After 38 Years, Run by the Man Who Made the Original
Truxton Extreme, the first new entry in Toaplan's legendary shmup series in 38 years, launches July 30 on PS5, Switch 2, Xbox, and PC, led by original creator Masahiro Yuge.
If you have spent any time in the shoot ’em up world, the name Truxton means something. It was Toaplan’s 1988 arcade shooter, known in Japan as Tatsujin, one of the games that helped write the rulebook for the whole genre. It has been 38 years since a new one. That streak ends on July 30, when Truxton Extreme arrives, and the best part is who is behind it: Masahiro Yuge, a co-founder of Toaplan and the mind behind the original, running a studio he named Tatsujin after the series itself. That same studio now looks after the entire Toaplan catalog, Snow Bros., Flying Shark, and Zero Wing, yes, the “All your base are belong to us” one.
So this is not a logo revival handed to strangers. It is the actual lineage picking the series back up, promising the foundational Toaplan feel with new mechanics layered on for modern players. It launches on PS5, Switch 2, Xbox, and PC through both Steam and GOG, with physical editions too.
What I did not expect from a Truxton game is the weight of the story. Truxton Extreme is set in the year 2200, with humanity swollen past 30 billion people and spread across seven colonized planets, when a self-replicating alien machine called Geranium starts tearing it all down. Ordinary people volunteer to become the TATSUJIN, elite pilots who give up their human bodies for cyborg ones to fly the last line of defense, and the game follows three of them across 18 chapters, told with comic-book art by Junya Inoue, the manga artist behind Batsugun, DoDonPachi, and Btooom! A shoot ’em up that stops to ask what you lose by trading away your humanity is not the pitch I expected, and I am here for it.
The details: digital runs $24.99, or $29.99 for the deluxe edition, and the physical version is $49.99 on Switch 2 and $39.99 on PS5 and Xbox, all on July 30. It is published by Clear River Games, a Swedish outfit built specifically around reviving retro franchises, which is the right kind of home for this. When the person who made the original is the one bringing it back four decades later, with a former Toaplan artist drawing the story, you pay attention. I am paying attention.
