Hellfire is a horizontally scrolling shoot ’em up originally conceived by Tatsuya Uemura at Toaplan, developed alongside Truxton as Japanese arcade publisher Taito’s experiment in translating the studio’s vertical-shooter style into a horizontal format, released in 1989 after a famously troubled development cycle. The home version was built separately by NCS Corporation for the Sega Mega Drive, first published in Japan by Masaya in September 1990, brought to North America that November by Seismic, and released in Europe by Sega in May 1992. Despite a fairly conventional shot-and-dodge structure on the surface, Hellfire stood out for letting players rotate their ship’s firing direction between four fixed angles on demand, a mechanic that turned basic enemy waves into genuine positioning puzzles and helped make it one of the more respected shooters in the Genesis library.