Gyruss

2,750,000,000 miles from home your journey from Neptune to Earth is threatened by 25 stages of attack by the evil Ideoclan Empire (which consists of Exarsions, Petarions, Terarions, Gigarions and - on the bonus stages - Zigmas and Dogmas.)

The purpose of this game is to fly through the solar system and reach Earth. The other planets that have you travel to before Earth are Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. It only takes two warps to arrive at Neptune, but all others including Earth take three warps to get to. Each time you reach a planet, there is a Challenge Stage where you try to destroy as many enemies as possible. After reaching Earth, there is a Challenge Stage followed by a very fast "three warps to Neptune" stage. After this, the levels and the background music start over.

Gyruss has been described as a cross between Galaga and Tempest.

When one takes over the High Score at the top of the screen, the 1 Up score and that score will both coincide until one reaches 999990 or so. At this point, the High Score will freeze at 999990 and 1 Up will go back to 0. The only way to verify a score greater than 1000000 is to note that the high score at the top of the screen does not match the High Score recorded in the registry of top players. Add the 1 Up score to High Score at the top of the screen to get total score or get a friend to keep track of how many times you flipped the machine to calculate scores greater than 2000000.

You can get double fire if you shoot the sunlike enemy that appears in front of you surrounded by two blue podlike enemies. Try to make this a priority.

To make getting double fire easier, try to stay at the bottom of the screen until the pod and sun formation appears as it will appear right in front of wherever your ship is after all enemies have entered and they start attacking. There must be at least three enemies left in the level for the pod and sun formation to show. If you lose a life and three enemies are left, the pod and sun will show up one more time, but if you lose a life after, they will not show anymore until the next level. After you get double fire, the sun enemy will be replaced on later levels with another pod. Destroy all three for some bonus points.

If you have only one enemy left and cannot seem to destroy it, just leave it alone and eventually it will just leave and the level will end.

Each level begins with four formations entering. If you destroy enough of these, a fifth formation will enter. As you pass each planet, more formations will enter towards the top of the screen. Learn to control your ship at the top as it will come in real handy on those Mars and Earth warps.

When formations enter from the edge of the screen, they will not hit you if you are right where they enter. You can use this to your advantage to take out the formation with little or no troubl, just watch out for asteroids.

Asteroids will always appear in your path they cannot be destroyed so you must get out of the way.

The bee-like creatures with the force field will always appear from the center and move outward. The force field will destroy your ship if you touch it. Destroy one of the creatures to disable their force field.

Although many players believe it is impossible to actually reach Earth, it is possible, and occurs on level 25. Earth is also seen on the title screen during the demo play.

This game was designed by Yoshiki Okamoto. Okamoto designed only two games while at Konami: Time Pilot and Gyruss. He later went to Capcom where he designed 1942, Final Fight, and the Street Fighter series of games.

Licensed by Centuri.

Gyruss is most often remembered for its fine musical score that plays throughout the game.

The game uses two Z80 microprocessors, one 6809 microprocessor, and one 8039 microprocessor. For sound it uses five AY38910 PSGs and a DAC.