Forgotten Worlds is a product of a bygone era. Believe it or not, back in the day arcades were a big thing. For years, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and arcade ports were synonymous. That was till Sega released the Sega Genesis in North America. Sega brought along a slew of arcade titles that were closer to the originals than the NES could reproduce. Forgotten Worlds was one of those arcade games that you could not get on the NES. Sega were seemingly addicted to licensing out their arcade games to Tengen for play on the NES around this time. Sega would eventually stop this practice, or Tengen quit licensing them.

8-Bit just wouldn’t cut it

Forgotten Worlds was originally a Capcom game. For some reason it never saw light of day on the NES or Super Nintendo. A version of Forgotten Worlds did make it to the TurboGrafx-16 platform though which made it weirder that Capcom would not do an official port to a Nintendo console.

Forgotten Worlds controls were changed for home

Gameplay wise, Forgotten Worlds is the same across most of the platforms. Boy did Capcom’s arcade action game get around too. You control a flying man, that has no visible means of doing so. He is armed with a floating gun turret that rotates around him. Players are tasked with defeating lizards, dragons with their guts exposed and more.

Difficulty is set to high

The challenge level is set on high, much like most of Capcom’s arcade games from the late 80’s. This was the time of the quarter muncher after all. The ports of Forgotten Worlds vary depending on the platform you are playing it on. The arcade version still looks the best but the Genesis version holds its own quite well.

Battle of the ports

Ports include computers like the Commodore Amiga and 64, IBM PC (DOS), Atari ST, ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC. The Turbo Grafx-16 Super CD-ROM would be the only other home console port of this era. Quite a spread of platforms – and people think we have too many platforms today. The original arcade game has been re-released on PlayStation 2 and Xbox in Capcom Classics Collection Vol 1 and for PlayStation Portable in Capcom Classics Collection: Remixed.  

For those looking for a hard as nails 2D side scrolling shooter, look no further. There are a myriad of options to play this game in many different forms.

Carl Williams

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