Space Firebird
1980 video game

Space Firebird is a 1980 arcade video game developed by Nintendo R&D1 and released by Nintendo in Japan and Europe. In America, the game was distributed by Far East Video. Sega-Gremlin also released a version of the game in North America.
Gameplay
Players guide a ship through deep space while encountering spherical objects that appear to look like a bunch of comets or shooting stars. They suddenly shapeshift into large creatures called Firebirds as the player gets closer to them and start attacking the ship in ever more complex looping formations. As a Space Ship Commander, players must seek out and destroy three kinds of Firebirds in three missions. The names of the Firebirds are Gulls, Eagles and the Mighty Emperor (or simply "Emperor"). The Emperor is destroyed by four hits, the Eagle with two hits and the Gull with one hit. The Eagles drop bombs that are aimed at sabotaging the ship controlled by players. When hit, the bomb scatters deadly shrapnel.
The public source identifies “Space Firebird” as 1980 video game. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Space, Firebird and video.
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This entry incorporates text from “Space Firebird” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.