How to play Plutos online
- Fly: arrow keys
- Fire: Z
- One or two players at the same time: F5 (left difficulty switch)
Gameplay
You fly up the screen through six levels, each ending with a boss. Only three of the backgrounds are really new; the other levels reuse them in different colours with changed enemies. Power-up capsules give you one of three weapons: twin machine guns (your starting weapon), a spread gun or an energy beam. Picking up the type you already carry upgrades it, up to four times. One more drops it back to level one. An “S” capsule makes you invincible for a short time. The game has no ending sequence, which suggests it was not quite finished.
The story behind Plutos
Plutos was programmed by Kevin Franklin, with graphics by David Peacock and Michael Owens. It seems to be based on Tynesoft’s Atari ST and Amiga game of the same name. A collector owned a prototype for years, but it needed a development kit and crashed often on a normal 7800. In 2008 the source files were found on a hard drive, and 7800 fans patched the game so it runs on any console. Why it was never released is unclear: Tynesoft seems to have planned Plutos and its sister game Sirius for the 7800, but left the games business before either came out.
