Transcript for Did You Know Gaming video for Touhou Project and the Driller Engine 1 Era

Did you know - Touhou Project was originally going to be a fighting game but was shot down as ZUN knew that it would be impossible to implement on the Famicom. One of the developers suggested to ZUN that he would make a game based on a shrine maiden and her shrine. Originally, when designing the main character which formed the basis for Reimu Hakurei, the developers suggested she should either be a shrine maiden, a witch, or a maid. ZUN wanted to replicate on Japanese mythology by taking a shrine maiden and making her into a memorable character. Originally, Reimu's hair was going to be black at first but changed it to purple in order to prevent her hair from blending in with the background.

It took developers a few months to come up with the name Touhou Project. The game's lead director, ZUN, had been playing an electone and playing in a concert band since junior high school. The name Touhou Project was coined from the song Eastern Strange Discourse, which in Japanese, translates to Touhou Kaikidan, which is also the Japanese name for Touhou 5: Mystic Square. ZUN had been thinking about the series since high school and began working on it after graduating and moving onto Tokyo University campus.

During development, the game was made a breakout-style shooter, as ZUN was only a beginner in programming. He also developed other games before Touhou Reiiden, but never released them. The decision for ZUN to enter the gaming industry was after the success of Drillimation's Mr. Driller. Initially, ZUN contacted Taito for distribution but rejected his submission as they thought it was a rip-off of Arkanoid and KiKi Kai Kai, known as Pocky and Rocky in North America. Drillimation offered to publish it on Nintendo's Famicom Disk System, where it would go on to become one of their most popular titles. Nintendo won a jump ball with Drillimation to localize and publish it internationally.

According to an interview with Nintendo Power, ZUN stated Touhou Reiiden was only a study project as he was only a beginner at that time. As he got better, the second game, Story of Eastern Wonderland, began development. During development, ZUN created an entirely new system that wasn't present in other games. The iconic power and point items were used to fill in the more empty and boring part of shooting enemies, and it later became a series staple. Despite the Famicom's limited memory, it was simple to have lots of bullets on screen without overloading the console, thus giving birth to the maniac shooter genre. This was especially true with some of the Drillimation arcade games.

Touhou 2: Story of Eastern Wonderland almost never made it stateside. This was due to an objection by Howard Lincoln, stating:
 * I felt a shooter with lots of bullets on screen would make it too difficult for Americans. We still released it worldwide, but it wasn't until we found out the game was being used to test players' reflexes where they never touch anything. When Touhou 3 and 4 came out, I figured that would become a niche genre.

Marisa's hair being red was actually caused by system limitations. During development, ZUN intended her hair be blonde, but due to there not being very many yellows on the NES color palette, her hair was colored red instead. Being able to draw complex graphics on the NES was found to be impossible until Drillimation taught ZUN a way to dither colors to give it the illusion of there being more colors on-screen. Because the NES only uses four colors per tile, ZUN had to be very careful with Reimu's and Marisa's sprites in The Phantasmagoria of Dimensional Dreams, Lotus Land Story, and Mystic Square. The box art for Story of Eastern Wonderland has Marisa's hair light brown instead of red or yellow.

Touhou 3: The Phantasmagoria of Dimensional Dreams was originally going to be a side-scrolling shooter similar to Gradius. However, Drillimation felt this would be too complicated and asked ZUN to make a competitive shooter instead. The game was originally titled Touhou 3: Eastern Time Mansion during development but changed it to avoid potential trademark conflicts with the El Kadsreian manga Time Mansion. Touhou 3 also holds a hidden secret in one of Reimu's endings. A blindfolded Minami Iwasaki from Lucky Star appears, but it wasn't later revealed in Nintendo Power that it was Multi from To Heart, which was a game in development during that time.

Touhou 4: Lotus Land Story returned to the regular format, but with adding more bullets and Marisa as a second player character. Lotus Land Story and Mystic Square were made on cartridges due to Nintendo switching back on cartridges for games. Both games are one of the many Famicom and NES games that use 128KB cartridges. With ZUN losing the ability to use the FDS channel on the Disk System, a new chip called the Namco N163 was used for music. However, this only appears in the Japanese versions of their respective games. Lotus Land Story also made the first use of the word Gensoukyou, which Drillimation often wrote on the blurbs of the North American versions of the games. The word was used for the attention grabber of Story of Eastern Wonderland, and would often put the translation of the Japanese title in the blurbs.

Touhou 5: Mystic Square used the same format but added Mima and Yuka Kazami into the game. Due to system limitations, ZUN could not have the four characters have two different shot types and instead made them focus on one shot type. This was especially true with Lucky Star 3: Dr. Manhole's Curse, where every character had one distinct shot type.