It's Time for This Cult Classic Shoot 'Em Up to Get a Rerelease
2025's unlikely revival of the developer G.rev means a Border Down rerelease could finally be on the horizon
Sure, 2025 has featured the launch of the Switch 2, of games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Blue Prince and Baby Steps and Hades II and Ryukyu that were labeled “game of the year!” by the masses after they were released (okay, fine, that last one was just me), of mass layoffs and boycotts and large-scale corporate buyouts and more generative AI boosters than you can shake a stick at. Which is a shame, because you could hit a lot of them with that stick while they input prompts to get advice on how to defend themselves.
The point is, it’s been a huge year for stories, so it’s easy to lose track of the smaller ripples among these larger waves. One such ripple is the revival of G.rev—the small Japanese developer never actually left, but still managed to return in a huge way this year despite this.
This began right away, as in January, G.rev rereleased Strania: The Stella Machina as The Stella Machina — EX for the Switch, which included not just the 2011 original version already available through backwards-compatability on Xbox systems, but also its 2020 revamped arcade rerelease, on consoles for the first time. In February, their 2005 arcade title, Under Defeat, received an updated and expanded release across Switch, Playstations 4 and 5, Xbox Series S and X, and Windows. It’s an excellent take on what was already a great game, and clearly its definitive edition in its third go at things. Then, in October, G.rev came out with another updated version of an older title of theirs, this time Mamorukun Curse!, released this time as Mamorukun ReCurse! Like with Under Defeat’s latest iteration, the idea here was to bring ReCurse! to as many platforms as possible, with as many game modes as possible, and, also like with Under Defeat, featuring the twin-stick gameplay option that always would have made sense for how the game wants to be played.
This has been quite the bounty for shoot ‘em up fans, as Under Defeat was an arcade title that was ported to the Dreamcast in Japan in 2006—years after the system was done as far as non-importing Americans were concerned—and then released on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 in HD: the digital storefront for the former is shutdown, and the latter’s digital marketplace saw it delisted in 2020. This rerelease of Under Defeat not only added all kinds of new stuff to do and ways to experience (or hear) it, but that it was available at all was a positive. Mamorukun Curse, similarly, was and is on the Playstation 3’s store, but that’s not exactly a thriving market in 2025. And Strania was still available through backwards-compatibility, but on the modern console that no one owns, and in a form that was, at this point, 14 years old, without the EX addition released in arcades just a few years ago.
If you’ve never heard of any of these games, or of G.rev, well, don’t worry about that. They are niche even as far as studios dedicated to making shoot ‘em ups go: G.rev listed on their own website that they had 10 employees as of 2011, and they haven’t bothered to update that page or number since. Their games are never huge, commercially speaking, when they come out, and the lack of general access to them certainly hasn’t helped. It’s likely that you know of or have played a G.rev game even if you weren’t aware of it, however. Yurukill, released in 2022, is a multiplatform, hybrid visual novel/STG, with G.rev handling those action portions. Dariusburst Chronicle Saviours, one of the various enhanced ports from that particular family of Taito’s Darius games, was developed by G.rev. Recall when Ubisoft published Wartech: Senko no Ronde on the Xbox 360? Probably not, since it was an arcade fighter and shoot ‘em up hybrid, but either way, that was a G.rev joint, too.
Whether you’re a sicko nodding along or a little lost right now, what will likely stick out the most from their library is from further back. Before they struck out entirely on their own at the turn of the century, they had bills to pay and money to raise. And they did that by partnering with Treasure on Ikaruga. Treasure was and is also a small studio, but in comparison to G.rev, they seemed huge—constantly working with the likes of Sega and Nintendo, with games that actually sold and were noticed. Treasure was a big deal from that point of view! And G.rev was there to co-develop Ikaruga—and later Gradius V—alongside them, as the assist studio whose name doesn’t even show up in the credits displayed on the game’s Wikipedia page. One good turn deserves another and all, so the director of Ikaruga, Hiroshi Iuichi, would later direct a G.rev game on the 3DS, Kokuga, following his (second) departure from Treasure. Like most of G.rev’s catalog before they started rereleasing it in 2025, Kokuga is also on a dead digital storefront, which is terrible news for the kind of person reading this who might have just gone, “Wait, Iuchi directed a game I didn’t know about???” (Don’t worry, he also surprise-directed this month’s Night Striker Gear, too, so apply that as a soothing balm.)
