Turrican totally looks like Truxton!

[Mendel]

:wooha:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9_fX0yXVDh0#t=811s

Look any familiar?

It should, because:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=70xp5mnsx1A#t=2037s


Turrican video: it is from 33 minutes and 50 seconds forward...
Truxton video: fast forward to 13 minutes 33 seconds

To me, this is funny because a big point was recently made about how Duke Nukem is ripping off Turrican and then it turns out the Turrican guys took their ideas from an earlier arcade game.

Okay, it´s not really ripping off here as they at least totally drew the art all over again and the game mechanics aren´t the same but it feels like to me like as if they added this vertically scrolling part of the game just so that they could put in this idea from Truxton! :roll:

Turrican 1 was released 2 years after Truxton and the game was popular enough to be featured all over the place, I even played the cabinet in a local swimming facility back in the day
so I´m sure they had a good chance to have played Truxton while they were developing Turrican. Of course Turrican is more than just that one part and it´s totally acceptable to take good ideas from other good games. I just thought this would still be interesting enough to post.

edit: I have confirmation from Manfred Trenz himself that he was inspired by Truxton!

You are right. Truxton gave me the "inspiration" to build this kind
of level for Turrican. I played Truxton many many times and this
level was something special to me.

You can share this reply with the community.

Manfred

 

[Amiga Forever]

Move to 0.33.46 on youtube of turrican

Yes, almost the same with different Graphics

 

[Mendel]

yeah if the links dont take you to the parts that I wanted to talk about then:

Turrican video: it is from 33 minutes and 50 seconds forward...
Truxton video: fast forward to 13 minutes 33 seconds

And that´s where it looks quite similar to me

 

[Mendel]

Not only that... but interestingly, when the level loads, when you die... the transition effect is very familiar!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9_fX0yXVDh0#t=10s

Blocks filling the screen and then going away

Thanks to ninn at arcade otaku for noticing this block thing


Now... what else is familiar, I do suppose they actually did totally redraw the graphics but I´ll still take a look at some of the "tiles" and "textures".

I could make an argument for the red weapon being quite familiar looking and also for the weapon upgrade mechanism being similar but that stuff is quite ubiquitous.

 

[roy_bates]

i cant see similaritys between two completely different games types,that would be a coincidence.

if that was the case every genre of game would be a copy of the next where ideas come in

that would be like saying,r-type is similar to hired guns because i found a few seconds of sprites that look alike.

 

[BLTCON0]

There's a given design similarity but "borrowing" is kept to a moderate extent I'd say.
Even more striking is the similarity of Truxton to Twin Cobra (which remains to this day by far the best shoot em up I've played). Both were Taito games circa 1988, so not really a surprise.

 

[Mendel]

I think there´s only one way to find out for sure. I´ll find contact information for Trenz and ask directly as to whether or not Truxton was any inspiration to him at all. Worst that can happen is no reply

 

[Mendel]

So I asked this question and I got the reply below that:


Hi. I´m a big fan of both arcade and Amiga games. One question I
wanted to ask. When developing Turrican (1990), was Truxton (1988) an
inspiration to you in any way? If there was any borrowing, then I
think it wasn´t as "bad" as with gianna sisters vs mario More like
a tip of the hat like the r-type device visible in cut scene when
entering space-ship in Turrican 2
All mentioned games are awesome, very unique games!
I was comparing these bits of footage and it is interesting to me!
13 min 31 seconds from start:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=9_fX0yXVDh0#t=811s
vs
33 min 50 seconds from start in this vid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=70xp5mnsx1A#t=2035s
Maybe you had played that game in some arcade and wanted to have the
same feeling in a level of the game to change the pace but still made
a game overall in a very different genre. Very interested as to
whether or not you can relate to an interest of an arcade collector
and retro gamer and reflect what you wanted to achieve with the game!
Thanks in advance!
If you decide to reply, please mention if it is okay or not to share
your answer with retrogames community.
-Perttu




Reply followed:
---------- Post added at 13:59 ---------- Previous post was at 13:58 ----------

Subject: Re: Part of Turrican inspired by Truxton?
From: DES
Date: Today, 08:58 EET
To: ****************
Hi!

You are right. Truxton gave me the "inspiration" to build this kind
of level for Turrican. I played Truxton many many times and this
level was something special to me.

You can share this reply with the community.

Manfred

 

[Amiga Forever]

Nice one

Now go tell Manfred to make TURRICAN 4 please

 

[Mendel]

If any of you guys have questions, I could ask if Manfred would be so kind as to agree to a short interview
edit: Looks like he´s busy though so probably not going to get anything more than what we already got.

 

[Amiga Forever]

Have you send email to him with all the questions

 

[Mendel]

Yeah, I´m not getting any more replies.

Looks like I´ll have to be happy with the reply to the initial question. I probably made him regret even answering the first one