1991 · Athena · Shooter

Dezaemon

Nintendo exclusive

Dezaemon is a game designing application that lets aspiring developers create their own vertical scrolling shoot-'em-up. Players have control over how their ship looks, design how their levels (up to three) will look, and also create a title screen. Players can also compose their own background music and create a list of credits to give credit to the designers of their game.

Released: 13 September 1991
Platforms: NES SNES
Genres: Shooter
Developers: Athena
Publishers: Athena
Series: Dezaemon
Themes: Educational
Country: Japan
Languages: Japanese

About

Dezaemon is a 1991 vertically scrolling shooter video game and game creation system developed and published by Athena for the Family Computer. It was released only in Japan on September 13, 1991. An enhanced version was released for the Super Famicom on September 20, 1994 and the PlayStation as Dezaemon Plus on May 24, 1996.

Despite its expensive price and entry barrier, the game has maintained a small but dedicated community of level creators, with new games such as Devil Blade Reboot being developed to this day. It is one of the earliest game creation systems easily accessible to console players, paving the way to similar systems such as Blast Works and Super Mario Maker. It was followed by a sequel, Dezaemon 2 for the Sega Saturn, as well as spin-offs, Dezaemon 3D for the Nintendo 64 and Dezaemon Kids! for the PlayStation.

Keywords

shoot 'em up

Media

The articlegameplay, story, development, reception

Gameplay

The player can design vertically scrolling shooter games with the available tools in a manner similar to developing for a NES development kit. The player's spaceship sprites can be customized alongside the backgrounds, music, enemies and projectiles, a relatively ambitious and robust system for the time. The SNES and PlayStation versions offer vastly improved variety in graphics and music. The SNES version includes Daioh Gale, a sequel to Athena's arcade shooter Daioh, as a built-in game developed to display the game's capabilities.

Reception

Gonçalo Lopes of Nintendo Life gave the SNES version a 8/10 score, praising the robust course editing tools and rewarding design experience, though he lamented the lack of a modern successor to the game.