DoDonPachi
| DoDonPachi | |
|---|---|
 Promotional Flyer | |
| Katakana | 怒首領蜂 |
| Developer | Cave |
| Publisher | Atlus |
| Producer | Kenichi Takano |
| Designer |
Naoki Ogiwara Akira Wakabayashi Hiroyuki Tanaka Junya Inoue Riichirou Nitta |
| Programmer |
Tsuneki Ikeda Satoshi Kohyama Makoto Watanabe Takashi Ichimura |
| Series | DonPachi |
| Release date | 5 Feburary 1997 |
| Genre | Shooter |
| Control | 8-way Joystick, 2 Buttons |
| Orientation | Vertical |
| Arcade hardware | CAVE 1st Generation Hardware |
| Sound | Yamaha YMZ280B @ 16.9344 MHz |
| Display | 15KHz |
DoDonPachi (怒首領蜂) is a vertically scrolling manic shooter developed by Cave and published by Atlus in 1997. It was the second game developed by Cave, and the tenth on the CAVE 1st Generation Hardware. As with its predecessor DonPachi, the title is both a Japanese term for expressing the sound of gunfire, and a term that relates to bees.
The sequel to this game is DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou, released by Cave in 2002. Prior to that, in 2001, IGS, in a deal that granted Cave the use of modified IGS PGM hardware, was able to obtain a license for the DoDonPachi name for IGS's in-house developed and published game, DoDonPachi II.
PCB identification
The Japanese version has the Atlus logo printed on the board, while other version do not.
Campaign Version
Also called Special Version, or DDP BLUE ROM, this is a special PCB handed out to the winner of a DoDonPachi scoring contest held by Cave to promote the game's Saturn port, in which each participant was asked to submit the highest score they could reach within a three-days period. It is essentially the same game with an extreme increase in difficulty, the addition of a Hyper Mode (a primitive form of the feature later seen in the sequel DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou) and a blue (rather than red) title screen. Extremely rare and sought after, a single specimen have been confirmed to exist so far, property of contest winner ZBL-NAI; in a 2010 press conference, Cave's Makoto Asada confirmed that no other boards have been produced and the company has lost every copy of the game's source code, effectively exposing the Campaign Version to the risk of being lost forever in case of hardware failure. Asada's comments, however, are peculiar as the very first Cave Matsuri (Cave Festival), held at the HEY! arcade in Akihabara in late December of 2006 featured not one, but two copies of the board. This event was before Asada joined the company, and is most likely the default statement the company makes to avoid ROM dump requests. While his statements, chronologically, could still be true, the loss of the two sets of ROMs and possibly the source code would have to have happened in the three years between the festival and the press conference, after having survived some 15 years prior.[1]