Grobda

About Grobda

Grobda (1984) is Masanobu Endo's Xevious spin-off for Namco in which a defenceless enemy tank from that game is given lasers and a shield to fight 99 rounds of a deadly future sport, made in just three months.

Grobda in Depth

Thousands of years in the future, humans pilot powerful laser-firing vehicles in a dangerous competitive sport called "battling". The player controls the Grobda, a screw-propelled tank, through 99 increasingly difficult rounds, each won by destroying all the enemies while dodging their fire as quickly as possible, in a multidirectional shooter similar to the Atari 2600's Combat. The laser destroys most enemies in one hit, though shielded ones need more. Each destroyed enemy explodes, taking out anything in its blast radius, Grobda included, and leaves wreckage that slows the tank down if it drives over it. Grobda's own shield briefly protects it from enemy fire, shown by a meter at the bottom of the screen, and once worn away it does not return until the next round.

The Grobda began as a defenceless enemy in Xevious, trying to dodge the player's air-to-surface bombs, and Endo thought arming it was a humorous idea that made for an interesting game. Composer Yuriko Keino wanted the background hum to speed up as the tank moved faster, and since the sound hardware could not do it, she wrote a custom program to make it possible.

Making Grobda

Endo, creator of Xevious and The Tower of Druaga, designed Grobda with a small Namco team. Namco released it in December 1984, and Game Machine reported it as Japan's top-grossing arcade game of that month; Magic Electronics distributed it in North America in September 1985. Dempa Software ported it to the PC-8801 in Japan the same year, and it has since appeared in Namco Museum Vol. 2, Battle Collection, Virtual Arcade and Megamix, the last adding a Grobda Remix minigame in which Pac-Man destroys enemies against the clock. It came to the Japanese Wii Virtual Console in 2009 and Hamster's Arcade Archives in 2023. In 1998 Allgame called it "a refreshing departure from slower, more methodical tank shooters such as Combat and Armor Ambush", praising its pace but criticising its high difficulty, and Hardcore Gaming 101 later found it much simpler than Xevious and was mixed on its difficulty.