Viewpoint

Viewpoint is a shoot 'em up game, originally developed by Aicom and published by Sammy in 1992 for Neo Geo MVS hardware. In this game, players drive a spaceship in an isometric view (similar to Zaxxon) and destroy enemies and bosses while listening to dance or hip-hop music tracks. Players can destroy the enemies with standard shots with the A button on the Neo Geo input controller standard. It can also be used to do a Charge Shot, a powerful shot done by holding the A button. By using the B button, the spaceship can discharge several bombs, each one with a different color that represents different explosions, depending on which one was used.

American Sammy brought Viewpoint to the Sega Genesis in 1995, courtesy of Nexus Interact, exclusive to North America. This version suffers from many slowdowns, which can be eliminated by running the game in a Teradrive or in a Genesis emulator with 68000 overclock options. The Genesis version was re-released in Sega Genesis Mini 2 and Mega Drive Mini 2 (by being a bonus title) with the option of playing it in Teradrive mode. A version for Sega Saturn was also planned, likely to be made by Visual Concepts and published by Electronic Arts, just like the PlayStation version.

Since 2005, Sega has acquired the rights of most intellectual proprieties from Sammy which does not hail from Pachinko and Pachislot machines, which in turn, makes Viewpoint a game owned by Sega for re-release purposes. This means Sega also does own the rights of Viewpoint for Arcade, Neo Geo AES, and Neo Geo CD versions, although is unknown if Sega does own the full rights of Viewpoint for Sharp X68000, Fujitsu FM Towns and PlayStation. It is also unknown if Sega owns the full rights of his unreleased sequel, Viewpoint 2064, for Nintendo 64 as well.