Solvalou was released for arcades by Namco in Japan in December 1991. It was the fifth title from them to run on the Namco System 21 arcade board, previously used in titles such as Starblade and Galaxian3: Project Dragoon. Much like those games, it was advertised as a "Hyper-Entertainment Machine" by Namco for its cabinet design and 3D shooting gameplay. The game is named after the ship the player controls in the Xevious franchise. A home conversion for the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer was announced by Gamefan magazine in June 1994, however such a port was never released. It was digitally re-released for the Japanese Wii Virtual Console in Japan on March 26, 2009, which supported the Wii Remote's pointer to recreate the original arcade controls. Music The music and sound effects in Solvalou were composed by Hiroyuki Kawada, a Namco veteran that worked primarily on established franchises such as Galaxian and Valkyrie. Kawada was enamored by Xeviouss simplistic sine wave music cues, and wanted to incorporate this into the music for Solvalou. His familiarity with various forms of techno allowed him to further build on the kinds of sound effects in Xevious and "give them new colors". Kawada composed a hypnotic, minimal techno soundtrack that features remixes of Xevious music in addition to original pieces inspired by the original's world and aesthetic. Kawada used Namco's recently-acquired Apple and Digidesign sound tools to create the music, sampling music and sound effects from the sample editor program Alchemy and then programming it on a Macintosh computer. He produced hand-made sound effects with Turbosynth, a modular sequencer program, and created custom sound driver functions that could produce techno-inspired beats. These tools allowed Kawada to easily create music and sounds through single-line commands; Kawada said that "it was truly invaluable to be able to get a danceable groove with only a single command". Reception Solvalou was well-received at launch for its gameplay and hardware capabilities, though it has been perceived as a commercial failure despite Game Machine claiming it was the third most-popular arcade game of February 1992 in Japan. Critics focused largely on the game's 3D graphics; Gamest awarded the game with the "3rd Best Graphic Award" at the annual Gamest Awards. A Gamest reviewer believed it was proof that Namco had perfected its 3D computer graphics technology, and another felt it provided the game with a proper sense of immersion. A Leisure