Master of Weapon

Master of Weapon was released in May 1989 in Japan.

Master of Weapon was very unpopular, mostly because it was too difficult for its time. Also, it was released during the 'Tetris era' and most of the Master of Weapon boards (Taito B System) were replaced by Sega's Tetris. Despite unpopularity, some Taito fans still love Master of Weapon because the game displayed excellent graphics and an unique BGM.

After the commercial failure of Master of Weapon, Taito decided to not continue development of vertical shoot'em ups. So, the famous company Toaplan developed their next shoot'em up game for Taito, "Twin Hawk".

A very rare prototype of this game is known as "Yukiwo". According to the advisor, Senba Takatsuna, Taito Game Sales Department requested to change the game's name before the release. 'Yukiwo' is the protagonist's name and was also from the first name of the programmer, Yukiwo Ishikawa (Y.I), later known as 'Yukio Abe' and producer of "Rayforce" which took inspiration from Master of Weapon. Originally, the game was planned to be a 2-Player simultaneous game, but it became a 1-Player game after the name change.

Senba Takatsuna said the game's development took about 6 months. The Mecha design was inspired by the famous anime 'Akira'.

The music composer Hisayoshi Ogura didn't compose the actual BGM. He only did the arrangement. The actual, uncredited composer is V. Osahi. When the game changed its name to Master of Weapon, the deadline was approaching fast. So V. Osahi re-used sounds from "Jigoku Meguri" and "Fighting Hawk".

Buddhism symbols appear in Act 1 and Act 6.

Default highscore table (BEST 5) :
NO SCORE PLAY NAME
1 992300 1 Y.I
2 713000 4 KON
3 314000 4 TET
4 224000 2 T.M
5 191230 1 KYO

Gamest (Japanese arcade magazine), December 1989, a Japanese gamer called 'RVS-R. Y' got a high score of 3,922,260 points.

Pony Canyon / Scitron released a limited-edition soundtrack album for this game (Taito DJ Station : G.S.M. Taito 5 - PCCB-00037) on August 21, 1990.