Darius III is a cancelled entry in the Darius series. Its existence was originally teased in one of the endings of Darius II but the game got cancelled while still early during its design phase.
According to Takatsuna Senba, game designer and graphic designer for Darius II, the three-screen cabinets used by the first two games were very expensive to fabricate, and thus the two-screen model used by some revisions of Darius II was made as a compromise to reduce production costs. [1][2][3] Darius III was initially envisioned for this two-screen setup, with some initial drafts submitted by Saeba. However, Taito's executives didn't greenlit the project, feeling the high budget costs to produce the Darius games couldn't be justified, and asked him to produce a new draft for a single-screen machine.[4] Saeba refused the idea and ditched the project, utilizing the project's original script idea to create Metal Black. Some of the early design drafts for Darius III were later reused for Darius Gaiden: Silver Hawk.[5]
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