Castle Take (lost arcade game; 1978)

Manual photo taken of the screen, taken by Twitter user @Zenji1.

Status: Lost

This article has been tagged as Needing work due to its lack of content.

Castle Take (aka キャッスルテイク, Kyassuru teiku, T.S. Castle Take) was an arcade game developed and released in Japan in 1978 by the company "Sankyo". It appears to be a clone of Atari's Breakout, themed around Feudal Japan with the main goal being to take over a Pagoda. The game was praised for it's impressive graphics for the time, using a much more advanced graphical chip that could produce more colors than most games made at that time. The game also had both an upright and a cocktail table model. Though the game's ROM has not surfaced online yet, there appear to still be playable machines in Japanese arcades. Currently, there is no footage anywhere online, only photos of the screen taken by various Twitter users. Any magazine articles or reviews of the game are currently unknown.

The company Sankyo later shifted focus to making Pachinko machines, their website documents the history of their Pachinko machines, but nothing regarding any of their block-breaking games.

Gameplay

As stated before, this is a game similar to Breakout, with a few gameplay differences to not make it a 1:1 copy. The player must break all the colored blocks in order to progress in the levels, and the blocks at the top are closed off in a more narrow passage (Representing the roof of a Pagoda). Due to the lack of gameplay footage and general information, it is unclear how many levels the game would have had.

Availability

There isn't clear estimate of how many units were produced or how common it was in arcades, but because it was popular enough to warrant a sequel be made Pyramid, it can be assumed it was decently popular enough to sell around 1,000 or so units, but not popular enough to have a home release on consoles such as the MSX or Nintendo Famicom.