This version of the game, however, is truer to the arcade original, allowing players who don't have the cash, contacts or hardware necessary to buy the original PCB to experience a near-perfect port of one of the most desirable arcade boards around. Last year, Cave released a re-crafted version of this, the fifth entry in the company's best-known shmup series, onto Apple's handheld devices, where it received renewed acclaim.

This is not the first time that Western players have met DoDonPachi Resurrection - originally released in the arcades as Do-Don-Pachi Dai-Fukkatsu (which translates rather wonderfully as Angry Leader Bee Great Resurrection). Cave's output is, then, a niche within a shrinking niche and for any business fuelled by the small change in arcade-goers' pockets, that is an alarming proposition.Īnd yet, by being flexible in embracing Apple's iOS devices, the developer has managed to expand its audience and adapt to the new landscape of games in a way that Japanese studios many times its size are still struggling to. The amusement arcade was arguably the first fatality in the industry's evolution. The diminutive Shinjuku-based developer's primary business was founded in the arcades, crafting shoot-'em-ups defined by screen-filling showers of bullets that look, to all but the aficionado, to be entirely unnavigable.

In a games industry that is shifting in scope, shape and structure with more speed and significance than ever before, few would have expected a company like Cave to be flourishing.

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