Pleiads

Overview

Pleiads (known in U.S. cabinet art as Pleiades) is a sci-fi shoot-'em-up developed and released by Tehkan for arcades in Japan on April 1981, with a U.S. release by Centuri on June 1981 and a European release by Tehkan sometime in 1981.

In Pleiads, players guide a starship left-and-right and fire missiles at alien invaders. Similar to Taito's 1980 game Phoenix, Pleiads uses a multi-leveled stage approach where each stage has three separate unique "levels" (from defending the skylines of Earth, to battling larger enemies in space, to battling the mothership). After defeating the mothership, players must dock the ship at a runway at Earth carefully, being careful to avoid running into parked ships and the runway's edge.

The game was later included in the Japanese PS2 compilation Tecmo Hit Parade and worldwide Xbox compilation Tecmo Classic Arcade. It also received a home port in 1983 by UA Limited for the Arcadia-2001, where it used its Pleiades name. A prototype for a cancelled Atari 2600 version, also ported by UA Limited, was later found and released.