can also be grabbed along the way such as speed increasers, 1UPs and a bomb module capable of obliterating any enemy caught within its blast radius that can also be triggered after taking enemy hits. Depending on the settings in the arcade version, the title uses either a checkpoint system in which a downed single player will start off at the beginning of the checkpoint they managed to reach before dying, or a respawn system where their ship immediately starts at the location they died at. Getting hit by enemy fire or colliding against solid stage obstacles will result in losing a life, as well as a penalty of decreasing the ship's firepower and speed to his original state and once all lives are lost, the game is over unless the players insert more credits into the arcade machine to continue playing. The game loops back to the first stage after completing the last stage as with previous titles from Toaplan, with each one increasing the difficulty and enemies fire denser bullet patterns as well as spawning extra bullets when destroyed. Synopsis The backstory of Zero Wing varies between each version, but the plot within the game itself remains consistent. Set in 2101, the game follows the signing of a peace treaty between the United Nations (also translated as the Milky Way Federation) and CATS, an alien cyborg who is described either as a dictator or a space pirate depending on the translation. However, CATS breaks the covenant and takes control of the Japanese/Federation space colonies. The protagonist Trent leads a ZIG space craft, which had managed to escape from the mothership destroyed by CATS, with the aim to defeat enemy forces, avenge the mothership and its crew and liberate the Earth. Development Zero Wing was created by most of the same team that previously worked on several projects at Toaplan, with members of the development staff recounting its history through various Japanese publications. Toshiaki Ōta was at the helm as development chief and also served as programmer alongside Hiroaki Furukawa and Tatsuya Uemura. Uemura also acted as composer along with Masahiro Yuge and Toshiaki Tomizawa. Artists Miho Hayashi, Naoki Ogiwara and Shintarō Nakaoka created the artwork while Sanae Nitō and Yuko Tataka served as character designers. Uemura stated that Zero Wing originally started as a project not intended for commercial launch to train new recruits at Toaplan, handling training