Star Force — stories left

Unlike Namco's arcade game Xevious (1983), which had gone into operation the previous year and been a major hit, it makes no distinction between anti-air and anti-ground attacks and lets the player attack with the same shot, which conversely also brings the drawback that ground objects get in the way when the player wants to hit something in the air, and the reverse.

Because the board used was powerful for the time, particularly in its scrolling performance, and because Namco's shooting game Xevious (1983) was a hit at the time, it appeared as a vertically scrolling shooting game on a vertical screen that made use of the hardware.

Attacking both ground and air with the same weapon, the shot, together with the importance of rapid fire, areas of variable length, scrolling with width to left and right, and a variety of hidden elements, marked a clear break from Xevious. This worked well, and it became a hit large enough to form part of the shooting game boom of the first half of the 1980s.

Sales of the game were promoted through the first nationwide video game competition to be called "a caravan", although it was not the first event of its kind organized by Hudson (they had previously promoted Lode Runner with a similar event).

In 1995, along with two other NES shooters, the Famicom version of Star Force was remade by Hudson Soft with minimal upgrades for the Super Famicom as part of the Japan-only release of the Caravan Shooting Collection.

Because of hardware limits, where the arcade version had 15 enemy craft on screen at once, this version has 8 enemies and 6 shots. In addition, 32KB of ROM was taken by Championship Lode Runner, released around the same time, so the 32KB ROM originally planned was changed to a 16KB one, and the changes below were made accordingly.

SENJYO (1983), released the previous year, sold well as a board, but it was not popular and many complaints reached Tehkan from arcades across the country, so the president at the time gave the strict order, "Use the same board as SENJYO and make a simple game with a sense of exhilaration", and this game was produced in about half a year.

The North American and European versions for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) were published two years later, in 1987, with significant revisions, and with Tecmo credited rather than Hudson on the title screen and box art.

In 2009, the arcade version was made available for download on the Wii's Virtual Console for 500 Wii Points as one of the four initial offerings for the "Virtual Console Arcade" category of the Wii Shop Channel (the other three being Gaplus, Mappy, and The Tower of Druaga from Namco).