Back at the turn of the century, unemployed programmer Toshiaki Fujino was presented with an opportunity that seemed too good to be true: having quit Konami and formed the independent studio Triangle Service with the intent of pursuing his own game ideas, and with funds running low, they stumbled over an ad specifically recruiting arcade shooting game programmers—even twenty years ago, the golden age of arcade STG was long over and the odds of finding employment doing such specialised work were extremely low, so Fujino jumped at the chance to not only secure the job but to also sell them on the game concept that Konami had knocked back, and that he'd been unsuccessfully shopping since he went solo.
Of course, it turned out to be too good to be true: this job was essentially a subcontracting gig for the ramshackle Korean company Oriental Soft, who ended up stiffing Fujino & co. (a composer pal who'd also worked at Konami, as well as an artist acquaintance) on months of pay and releasing their unfinished, "cancelled" game to arcades as G-Stream 2020, a game most famous for being distributed on such shoddy hardware that multiple boards were melted in the process of trying to dump the ROMs. Throwing caution to the wind, Fujino hurriedly remixed his work into a new game, XII Stag, which he was able to release later that year in arcades via Taito's PlayStation-based G-NET hardware. (Only three STG were released in arcades that year: G-Stream 2020, XII STAG and a little game called DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou.)
From there, Fujino was able to continue putting together scrappy games, mostly in the STG vein, for both arcades and consoles, with the Dreamcast port of his second STG, Trizeal, garnering a particular amount of attention off the back of a viral post on his website that, in a self-deprecating way, offered a very frank assessment of his company's future, triggering a unexpected groundswell of support that saw his DC port go from virtually no orders to eventually getting a second run.
(Toshiaki also caught attention for his distinctive calligraphy, and ended up handling calligraphy/logos for quite a few STG/arcade-related projects. He wrote the Takadanobaba Mikado sign!)
Fujino ended up being particularly prolific on Xbox 360, with virtually everything he's ever made ending up there in one form or another—including G-Stream 2020, which he surreptitiously ported as part of a 10th-anniversary double-pack with XII STAG (now renamed Deltazeal and XIIZEAL, respectively). As with many Japanese STG devs, his initial pledge to support the Xbox One never really went anywhere, and he's released almost nothing to consoles since, with his output over the last decade amounting to much-welcomed Steam ports of his X360 catalogue and some very low-key PC/mobile/arcade applications, as well as a Japan-only Switch port of some of his non-STG arcade games (including his 2012 take on Sega's Pengo, which never came to PC.)
Now, out of nowhere, he's back on consoles with a self-published port of the game that almost killed his indie career before it began: the game itself is probably the most conventional STG he ever made and is very much in the vein of the later 2D Raiden games (particularly visually, as the artist had worked on the Raiden Fighters series), so I'd recommend it to anyone who wants a straight-down-the-line vertical STG with the kind of old-school detailed dot art that most indies don't even try to recapture. The port itself seems more or less the same as the X360/PC version, save for a new director's commentary feature (read via text-to-speech, so I'm very curious to see how it turns out in English...), so my hope is that Fujino's able to get his entire catalogue onto the eShop in short order and, hopefully, make something totally new, because it's been a while and I'm sure he's as eager to put out a big new game as anyone else.
