and would have made the memorization mechanic a pointless addition. Naoki Ogiwara, Sanae Nitō and Yuko Tataka acted as game designers in the development cycle. Ogiwara had already began work on designs for Truxton in secret during production of Twin Cobra due to his interest in creating science fiction artwork, which were finished after the latter was completed and gave inspirations to the team with enemy patterns. The Sega Genesis version was developed in-house by the same staff from the original arcade release after Sega discussed with Toaplan in regards of a conversion for their console. Both Uemura and Tataka have stated that working with the Genesis proved to be difficult due to several restrictions imposed by the hardware. Release Truxton was released in October 1988 in Japan, where it was published by Taito. It was later released on February 1989 for both Europe and North America, published respectively by Taito and Midway. The Japanese version was named Tatsujin, based on the Japanese word for "master". It became Toaplan's first game to have their logo displayed on the title screen and their name credited. On 25 June 1989, an album containing music from the title and other Toaplan games was published exclusively in Japan by Datam Polystar. In December 1989, Truxton was ported to the Sega Genesis by Toaplan and was first released in Japan and North America by Sega, who later distributed the title across Europe on November 1990. The Genesis port stays faithful to the original arcade release but has a number of key differences such as having a smaller color palette that lead to sprites being recolored in different ways, along with other presentation and gameplay changes from the original version. The Genesis port was later re-released by independent publisher Retro-Bit in 2020. Truxton later received a conversion to the PC Engine by Sting Entertainment and published exclusively in Japan by Taito on 24 July 1992. The PC Engine release has visual and audio changes but introduces an options menu where multiple gameplay settings can be altered. A version for the Sharp X68000 was in development and planned to be published by Kaneko, however despite being advertised in Japanese publications such as Oh!X, this version was never released to the market for unknown reasons. In September 2019, Truxton was re-released for iOS and Android mobile devices only in Japan by MOBIRIX Corporation under the name Tatsujin Classic.