RADICAL RADIAL: 1983 Arcade Action Shooting by Nichibutsu

The Tire-Shaped Machine You Pilot

In RADICAL RADIAL, an arcade action shooting game from 1983, you pilot a tire-shaped vehicle across hazardous courses teeming with aliens and enemy vehicles. These adversaries litter the path, and you must navigate through them while managing your speed with accelerating and decelerating functions. The goal is to reach the end of each course, using these speed adjustments to weave past threats and maintain control. The tire-shaped design defines the craft's handling, as you balance momentum to avoid collisions and keep moving forward.

Accelerating enables you to speed through the dangerous stretches where enemies cluster, while decelerating helps you thread through tighter spots or line up shots. Although the source mentions shooting and jumping, the core movement relies on these two speed controls. The tire-shaped vehicle responds to these inputs, letting you adjust your pace to outmaneuver alien and enemy vehicle obstacles. The ultimate objective remains reaching the goal, and the interplay between speeding up and slowing down is central to surviving the courses.

Courses Built for Speed and Danger

In RADICAL RADIAL, the courses you traverse are specifically described as dangerous and are filled with aliens and enemy vehicles. To navigate these hazardous paths, you rely on four actions: accelerating, decelerating, shooting, and jumping. Each course is a gauntlet where these inputs must be used in combination to survive. The tire-shaped vehicle you control is built for speed and must be guided through the threats that populate the route. Reaching the goal at the end of each course is the primary objective, and the game demands that you employ all available maneuvers to get through.

The documented rules specify that accelerating, decelerating, shooting, and jumping are the actions needed to get through the dangerous courses. As you pilot the tire-shaped vehicle, you must head for the goal while using these actions to overcome the aliens and enemy vehicles that block your way. The courses are designed to be speed-focused, so acceleration helps you cover ground quickly, but deceleration and jumping are equally important for threading through tight spots and avoiding collisions. Shooting lets you clear a path, and all four actions work together to define the challenge of reaching each goal.

Aliens and Enemy Vehicles in the Way

The route through every course is occupied by aliens and enemy vehicles, and these are the hazards the game's documentation names directly. Your tire-shaped craft moves forward through this traffic while you use four actions to respond: accelerating, decelerating, shooting, and jumping. Each action applies to a different part of the problem. Shooting addresses the aliens and vehicles themselves, while acceleration, deceleration, and jumping govern how the vehicle travels past or around them. The goal at the end of the course remains the destination, and the enemies sitting between your start and that goal are what the four actions are meant to handle.

Because the courses are described as dangerous and filled with aliens and enemy vehicles, the documented rules pair shooting with the movement actions rather than treating it alone. Shooting is one of the four listed ways to get through, alongside accelerating, decelerating, and jumping. When enemies block the way, a player can fire at them; when the path calls for a different response, the speed controls and the jump cover it. The alien and enemy vehicle presence is thus the condition that makes shooting part of the required action set, and the tire-shaped vehicle is what carries all four responses through the course toward the goal.

A Nichibutsu Arcade Release from 1983

RADICAL RADIAL is an arcade action shooting title dated to 1983, and the documentation lists Nichibutsu as its publisher. Its platform record names only the arcade format, and the game is cataloged under the action shooting genre. That combination places the title within the publisher's 1983 output: a single arcade release identified by name, year, publishing company, hardware setting, and genre classification. The catalog entry preserves these attributes together, so the title, the year, the publisher, the arcade platform, and the action shooting designation function as one identification set rather than separate details.

The same records tie the name RADICAL RADIAL to the year 1983, to Nichibutsu as publisher, to the arcade platform, and to the action shooting genre. Anyone checking the listing therefore encounters a single arcade action shooting game from 1983 issued under Nichibutsu, with no other platform, publisher, or genre attached in the documentation. Independent hands-on verification has not been performed, and controls, movement, combat, scoring, and progression sit among the game's documented unknowns, so the identification above rests on the licensed publisher catalog rather than a tested play session.

First published Oct 17, 2026.