Forgotten Worlds

Forgotten Worlds can be played by up to two players simultaneously. The player controls a flying muscle-bound soldier armed with a rifle with unlimited ammo. The Player 1 character is equipped with a long-range automatic rifle, while Player 2 has a short-range wide shot. The controls in the original coin-op version consist of an eight-way joystick for moving the character in the air while flying and a unique rotatable button known as the "roll switch".

Rotating the switch left or right allows the player to adjust their character's aim in one of sixteen directions, while pressing it causes the player character to shoot his gun. This allows for the player to move their character anywhere while keeping their aim in one direction. Pressing the switch rapidly will cause the character to perform a "megacrush" attack which will destroy all on-screen enemies, but at the expense of a portion of their vitality gauge.

Set in the 29th century, an evil god known as Bios has destroyed most of the Earth, turning it into a desolate wasteland known as the Dust World. Two nameless supersoldiers are created by the people to defeat Bios and the eight evil gods who serve him.

5 million or $10,000,000 (equivalent to $27,000,000 in 2025). The game used four megabytes of sprite data. The game started off as a regular side-scrolling shooter, but Yoshiki Okamoto wanted a more imaginative game. During development, Capcom tried to make the game easier to play, having received criticism about how hard it was to dodge enemy projectiles in previous games.

As this was the first game to use the CPS-1, Capcom tried to fully maximize its software capabilities. The game did not generate enough income upon its release due to large numbers of shooter games in the market and there were increased expenses due to a shortage of chips needed for the CPS-1 boards.

In Japan, Game Machine listed Forgotten Worlds on their September 1, 1988 issue as being the second most-successful table arcade unit of the month, outperforming titles like Sky Soldiers and Ninja Spirit. In the United Kingdom, U.S. Gold predicted the home computer port could outsell their previous best-selling Capcom release Bionic Commando, which had sold 70,000 copies in the UK as of early 1989.

The game was met with highly positive reviews from critics. Upon release, the arcade game received positive reviews from Computer and Video Games, The Games Machine, Your Sinclair, and Commodore User. Critics compared the arcade game favorably to earlier shooters including Capcom's Side Arms (1986), Konami's Nemesis (Gradius) and Sega's Space Harrier.