City Diver [Arcade – Cancelled]

City Diver [Arcade – Cancelled]

City Diver is a cancelled arcade 3D shooter that was being developed by Taito in 1994 / 1995. A demo of the game was shown at AOU Show 1994. According to an article published on Edge 8 (may 1994), City Diver was supposed to feature a glasses-free 3D display:

Sanyo – in conjunction with NHK Engineering Services and Toppan Printing – have developed an LCD projector and lenticular lens array which splits the picture into right- and left-side images, providing the viewer with full depth perception.

city diver taito

The same article described this title as a “stunning four-player 3D shoot ’em up with a mixture of gorgeous rendered images and 3D polygons“.  Virtua Cube-x was another game that was going to use the same technology, but it got probably cancelled as well or converted into a ridefilm for Taito IDYA.

City Diver was apparently planned to be fully unveiled at JAMMA show in September, but it’s currently unknown if the game was present at the arcade exhibition in any form.

Two videos of the game surfaced on niconico in 2013. Thankfully, the clips’ description was translated by lostlevels.org user Boco:

“From a promotional video I received as a gift. Canceled arcade game from Taito in 1995. I played this when it was out for a location test in Shibuya. It was a helicopter flying game similar to “Air Inferno“, with a singleplayer “Mission mode” and a 2-player “battle mode” that used two linked cabinets. I think after it was canceled it got turned into one of those CG movie games used by the Taito IDYA. “

Going by this description, a playable build of City Diver must have existed at some point, then. Unfortunately, we don’t have any additional information about this location test or the IDYA ride film version. The two niconico videos were joined together into a single Youtube clip that can be seen below.

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Videos:


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