Gigandes (ギガンデス) is an arcade game developed by East Technology in 1989 and released in February of 1990. It’s a horizontal shmup in the style of R-Type featuring all of the bio-mechanical tropes common to the era. It was designed for the Taito X System hardware which used a YM2610, the same audio configuration used in the Neo Geo, and was composed by Akira Inoue and Takaro Nozaki.
East Technology was a small developer based in Shinjuku that mostly worked on arcade games. The company was founded in 1987 and operated until around the mid-1990s. East Technology only produced around 10 games; their most notable were Double Dragon III: The Rosetta Stone published by Technos, and Operation Wolf 3 and Silent Dragon published by Taito.
The soundtrack to Gigandes is eccentric and in some ways ahead of its time. Full of weird and off-putting samples, the tonal whiplash is at times abrasive and at others catchy, but always compelling. Relative unknowns Akira Inoue and Takaro Nozaki put together a one-of-a-kind soundtrack that is worth the time to explore and we hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we did.
All songs composed by Akira Inoue and Takaro Nozaki
- 00:00 Brain Dump (Stage Start)
- 00:10 Speshul Atak Younit (Chapter 1: Round-37 Takes Off!)
- 06:23 Climax Without Foreplay (Chapter 2: The Rival Arrives)
- 09:04 Propagandasm (Stage 2 Boss)
- 14:27 Populism Answer (Chapter 3: Mesopotamian Nightmare)
- 17:37 Behold! This Face (Stage 3 Boss)
- 23:36 New Order (Chapter 4: Save the Colony Part 1)
- 27:21 Vertigo Factory (Chapter 5: Save the Colony Part 2)
- 33:09 Aquarium Island (Chapter 6: Showdown at Tatarajima)
- 36:14 Fight Fire with Fire (Stage 6 Boss)
- 41:40 It Ain’t a Plot (Chapter 7: The Underground Kingdom of Larzan)
- 45:15 5-Count (Last Chapter: Sleep Quietly, My Friend)
- 49:12 Unused 4
- 52:29 Exposure Over (Last Boss)
- 54:49 Loving as Much as a Wound That Heals (Name Entry 1)
- 59:07 The Warrior and the Official (Name Entry 2)
- 59:46 5.67 Billion Years of Solitude (Game Over)
Thanks to The Golden Horse of VGMRips for the pack!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:52 — 79.7MB)