This is a classic arcade shooter created by Konami in 1983. The purpose of the game is to pilot the ship through the solar system, beginning three warps from Neptune and heading towards the Earth, planet by planet. It is indeed possible to reach Earth, at which point the game will loop, and the difficulty will increase. The game is often described as Tempest meets Galaga - Galaga because of the space-based theme, enemy formations, and shoot-em-all bonus stages, and Tempest because of the stage layout where the player's ship is constrained to circle around the screen, and enemies appear to come up through a forced-perspective "tube." Also, much like in Galaga, an important strategy in Gyruss is to get double fire, allowing the player to fire two shots at once. This is much easier in Gyruss than in Galaga, however, where the sacrifice of one of the player's lives is required to obtain double fire. Gameplay is incredibly straightforward - the player's ship is controlled using the joystick, and the firing is controlled by prodigious, RSI-inducing pressing of the fire button.
Gyruss was designed by Yoshiki Okamoto, a famous Japanese game programmer whose later credits while working for Capcom include the megahits Time Pilot, Final Fight and Street Fighter II. One of the most memorable features of this game is its soundtrack, which consists of an extremely catchy synthesized rendition of Bach's Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor.
In addition to the arcade version, distributed in the United States by Centuri, this game was released for:
Gyruss can be played under emulation using MAME.
a small comment for your consideration - does anybody besides me miss playing games
like Gyruss in a dark, smoky, bleep-bloop-filled roller rink arcade, or in the corner of a dusty
grocery store, next to the firewood and road salt? to me it was a huge part of the charm.
/msg me with any fond reminiscences (or to tell me to drop this comment) ^_^