The game that launched a legendary series that is still seeing games made today, the latest was Burst in arcades, not long after the PSP version, except the arcade version allows 4 players to play at once, has 3 monitors like the original 2 games did (or 2 sometimes in Darius II's case), has more stages, and bosses in it. This is the only one that is checkpoint based, and pretty damned hard to beat.
Was Darius really a nice arcade game back in the day? I can only imagine this was ahead of its time for a 1986 arcade game to support elements you see nowadays, including parallax scrolling and 16-bit artwork.
I was 12 years old when I first saw this game back in the mid 80's. It was a phenomenal thing to see and play, though my memory feels the music and sound effects had more oomph back then compared to today. It was damned hard, and few people made it past the middle stages, but the cabinet was awesome (I played the sit-down version). There was no such thing as a three-screen arcade cabinet anywhere else and it didn't matter that the three screens blended into each other oddly, it was simply one of the most advanced games of the time. Parallax scrolling was already in games on the Commodore 64 at home, but it was the sheer size of Darius as a game with all its levels, creative use of sea creatures as end of stage bosses and of course the inimitable cabinet that really attracted crowds. It was not unusual to see three layers of people watching others play.
![1986 [60fps] Darius A-C-E-I-M-S-X 6231340pts ALL (Score Attack)](/img/logo.svg){kind=logo}
