What shmup invented the focus movement?

[Elaphe]

...or what was the first to use it? I mean the feature consisting in slowing down your ship or character when keeping a button pressed.

[ptoing]

I am not entirely sure, but I would say Donpachi. Could be wrong.

[trap15]

Probably DonPachi, yeah. That element was possibly inspired by the "fast" movement item in Dogyuun that allows you to move really super fast while holding the Item button. Maybe.

[Eno]

You may want to take a look at this thread. The OP hasn't updated everything so what you're looking for might be somewhere on the other pages.

[Bananamatic]

touhou

[ptoing]

touhou

[Blackbird]

Didn't Batsugun have some kinda feature similar to focus? I'm remembering something about one of the ships from Batsugun having focus in reverse for some reason.

[eatdogs]

Grind Stormer on the genesis had the sort of thing you are mentioning. It wasn't really a slowdown of the ship, but if you pulled backwards (vertical shmup) your fire would concentrate into a bigger, more powerful blast.

Grind Stormer was made by Toaplan, so there's also that.

[Mortificator]

Didn't Batsugun have some kinda feature similar to focus? I'm remembering something about one of the ships from Batsugun having focus in reverse for some reason.

Yeah, the Type C has a wide shot when you tap and a concentrated one when you hold down the button, though it doesn't affect speed.

Interesting points brought up about Grind Stormer and Dogyuun. It also occurs to me that in Salamander, which Ikeda's said was an influence on him, you get hella slowdown if you shoot while fully powered-up.

[LordHypnos]

Was just noticing that in Zero Rei (X68000, 1994, according to my rom), there are two shot types, powerful / narrow / red and weaker / spread / green, and the red one also slows you down. It's kind of like a focus shot, if you think about it.

[God]

There's that macross game. Robot mode is slower and I think does more damage. Still different from focus but getting kinda warm.

I like the salamander theory.

[MathU]

You know one thing to keep in mind is that a lot of shooters have slower movement vectors when traveling diagonally. You can take advantage of this by pressing backward against the screen with your ship to reduce your speed for finer movements. I've noticed this in games as early as R-Type and Mr. Heli.

[ptoing]

Yeah, backward or sideways, whichever border of the screen you are at. I was aware of this, but never actually figured to maybe use it for dodging.

[MathU]

I find it useful quite often in horizontal shooters, especially Darius Gaiden and G Darius. Comes in handy in a lot of Gradius games too with their tight boss lasers (except the first game where the vectors don't change).