Past meets present: Gulkave

Compile is one of the great shooting game developers, and a not-insignificant part of that legacy comes from their work in the 8-bit space. The small Japanese studio not only released one of the pillars of the era in Zanac — which is notable for not just presenting Compile’s house style with STG, but also thanks to its approach to the concept of “rank” in a shooter, with procedurally generated enemies determined by an “Automatic Level Control” system — but stuck around on 8-bit platforms for years following the rise of 16-bit games, pushing the Famicom and Master System and Game Gear to their limits.

Compile also stands out for focusing primarily on the living room with its shooters: while so many of the greats in the genre at the time got their start in arcades and then were ported to consoles and computers, Masamitsu “Moo” Niitani’s crew focused on those who played at home. Which is how something like 1986’s Gulkave can be considered a technical achievement even coming out a year after Konami’s legendary Gradius — they aren’t being measured with the same instruments, you know? So Gradius can be this astounding 16-bit marvel of visuals and sound, and Gulkave can still be a credit to Compile when… well, I once described this game for Paste as being one that “isn’t going to win any beauty contests,” so.

That was for a blurb in a longer article ranking Compile shoot ‘em ups, however: here, there is space to go deeper on Gulkave. No, it won’t win any beauty contests, but give it some context and you’ll come away impressed with this visual work all the same. And that’s because Gulkave released on the MSX, SG-1000, and Sega Master System (but only in South Korea on the latter): the MSX was a known problem when it came to games that scrolled due to the choppiness that resulted, the SG-1000 was Sega’s first console, and the Master System, for the advances it featured compared to the original SG-1000, was still “just” an 8-bit platform even if it arrived on the scene years after Sega’s initial effort and Nintendo’s Famicom.

Despite these limitations, Compile managed to make a smooth-scrolling horizontal shooter for the MSX that featured parallax scrolling, designed to avoid the issue of choppiness that plagued the system. And lots of parallax, too, with multiple layers at once getting the treatment to create a feeling of depth in more than one part of the background, giving what is a relatively simple-looking shooter in stills a real presence in motion. On top of this, Gulkave would inevitably fill the screen with bullets and enemies to fire them — it’s an impressive game in this regard, one that showed early on in Compile’s existence their ability to squeeze just a little more out of a platform than others seemed capable of.

The programmer and designer of Gulkave was Satoshi Fujishima, often seen in the credits of Compile’s games as “PAC”. Fujishima had worked briefly on Zanac before moving on to a different project, per that game’s designer, Takayuki “Jemini” Horono — Fujishima stuck around long enough to make some serious changes to Zanac like the power-up system that came to define so many Compile shooters, and Horono described him as “honestly some kind of genius,” whose planning documents he continued to follow — and add on to himself — after he exited to work on a different game.

Fujishima’s penchant for what were, at the time, non-traditional power-up systems reared its head in Gulkave, as well. In 1985, Gradius introduced a power-up system that had borrowed from role-playing games and the investing of points into specific skills to create a custom character who would play like you wanted them to. You collected orbs which could be stored or spent as they filled a bar at the bottom of your screen, allowing you to prioritize speed, weapon types, options, shields, and so on at your own discretion. Gulkave borrowed the idea of the power-up bar and the collecting of items to progress along the bar, but the similarities end there.

That’s because Gulkave’s power bar wasn’t about planning for specific upgrades, but instead memorization or randomization, depending on what kind of effort you wanted to put into remembering what each of the 16 squares making up the bar represented. The squares are not labeled in any way, but each is a different weapon type, and acquiring the numbered pickups that drop after every 20 defeated enemies will move you along as many squares on the bar as the item displays on it — a “1” means one square, “5” means five, that sort of thing.

Here’s the rub: the bar is not ordered by weapon strength, which means that you could move one spot or three spots or five spots and end up with a weaker weapon than the one you already had. “Well that’s some bullshit,” you say, but it gets better or worse than that, depending on your idea of a good time and love for systems with some real push-and-pull to them: these pickups are also the only way that you can restore shields to your ship in Gulkave.

So! If you want to recover shields — and unless they are full, why wouldn’t you? — you are going to have to make decisions, regularly, about whether more shields or keeping the weapon you are currently using makes more sense for you in that moment. Here’s an additional wrinkle, though: the only way to get extends in Gulkave is through certain point thresholds, and the most significant point boosts you get are from 1) picking up these weapon power-ups and 2) the end-level bonus for remaining barrier. You get your first extend at 30,000 points. Basic enemies are worth 80 points, more advanced ones can nab you a couple to a few hundred. Pickups can get you 2,000 points, and even a not-quite-full shield at the end of a level can get you close to 3,000. You’re going to want to roll the dice so you can survive longer — while Gulkave has infinite continues, your score resets at a Game Over and you are sent back to the beginning of a level when you retry, whereas dying just sends you back to a checkpoint.

One thing that works to Gulkave’s advantage with this system, outside of it constantly engaging you rather than ever letting you go on autopilot with a powerful weapon, is that you avoid the “Gradius Syndrome” issue of dying and losing your superpowered arsenal late-game or right before a boss, resulting in you trying to take on some difficult challenges with your little pea shooter because you were hosed by a checkpoint. Gulkave is a constant of going from strong to weak and learning to survive the latter state to get back to the former even when things are going well, but since you have a shield — albeit one that can take serious damage all at once depending on the enemy you crash into or are shot by — you also aren’t regularly going down in a single hit. It helps, too, that even Gulkave’s weakest weapons are still stronger than the default in Gradius, and that the downside to them has more to do with the rate of fire combined with a lack of spread: your more basic shots are a four-at-a-time, single pixel height beam, whereas there are some others that take up a significant chunk of real estate in front of you with each shot — a necessity given how many enemies try to sneak up behind you or beside you to either unleash a flurry of bullets you suddenly have to dodge, or just straight-up ram into you.

There are 32 levels in the MSX edition of Gulkave, which was the largest version by two. You are flying the fighter Zaiigar to eight different fortresses — one every four levels — to defeat the Gulbas forces amassed there. There certainly are not 32 different backgrounds in this game, but Compile put quite a few in there, some of them looking like the interior of a space fortress, some a rocky lunar surface, some more Martian in appearance due to the red, and most with multiple layers of parallax scrolling combined with blinking star fields, and whenever you see a background you have already seen before, enemy patterns, type, and quantity have all increased. There are also levels that are a bit of a combination of both interior and exterior — this video shows one such background, as well as enemies that don’t shoot at you but instead follow your location on screen and spawn from those points to attempt to get you to collide with them and suffer heavy shield damage.

Later on in the game, you will see this kind of enemy at the same time you are also facing ones that are shooting at you, while, simultaneously, foes that attach to your ship and drain your shield when they collide with you — invincible enemies that will make a beeline right for you if you happen to shoot them, as well — float across the screen. Yes, this is a shooter, but even back in 1986 here was a developer toying with the idea that not shooting was sometimes preferred, depending on what you were up against.

While things can get very hectic, the right weapon combined with remembering to pay attention to the top and bottom of the screen for enemies trying to hide — some of which also appear in Zanac, here flipped from vertical to horizontal — goes a long way. There is also the occasional screen-clearing bomb pickup, which will both wipe enemies from the screen and give your score a significant boost. And while 32 levels might sound like a ton for an STG, you have to remember that this game was not designed with arcades in mind, and it comes with not just unlimited continues, but also the ability to pick up from the stage you left off at. So if you get through 10 stages at a time or so before you decide hey, that’s enough, you can come back later without having to start over completely.

While Gulkave is one of Fujishima’s earlier shooters, it was not his last. He was also the designer on Guardic — an ambitious, unique the game that The Guardian Legend spun out of — was the programmer and planner on the only STG on the PC-FX, Chōshin Heiki Zeroigar, and in 2024 was credited among other ex-Compile developers on Changeable Guardian Estique, which was designed by Hirono and certainly lived up to the legacy of both industry veterans. Fujishima was all over myriad Compile releases in a variety of roles for a decade, but would leave in 1994 to form his own studio, Fupac, which doesn’t have a regular release schedule but is still active today, with its last release a tile-matching puzzle game, Kani Pon!, released for iOS and Android in 2025.

While Gulkave had never been released in North America before — the MSX release was for Japan and published by Pony Canyon, the SG-1000 also stuck in Japan, this time from Sega — D4 Enterprise put it on their EggConsole service on the Nintendo Switch in spring 2025. This is the MSX release of the game, and it includes an art gallery with various scans from the manual and box, as well as save states and both fast-forward and rewind. It’s one of many Compile games that D4 has put on EggConsole, as they are the rightsholder in the present for the vast majority of the defunct studio’s library; only recently, though, has that resulted in these games being made available outside of Japan again, or in the case of Gulkave, for the first time.

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

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