Touhou Project

• 1. Thirty Copies

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  On the 15th of August 1997, at a large dōjin fan convention called Comiket 52, a university student released the first Touhou Project game. According to its creator, who goes by ZUN, only 30 copies were sold. Touhou Project is a bullet hell shoot 'em up series, a genre where the player threads a tiny character through screens packed with enemy bullets. Since that quiet debut, ZUN has published 20 mainline games and 13 spin-offs. He has also produced print works and music albums. The franchise has frequently held the record for circle participation at Comiket. In October 2010 it entered the Guinness World Records as the most prolific fan-made shooter series. How does a project built by one person end up supporting thousands of other creators? What kind of world did he invent that so many people wanted to draw, write and arrange music for? And how did a single melody from the fourth game travel so far beyond it?

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• 2. One Person Studio

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  Jun'ya Ōta was a mathematics student at Tokyo Denki University when he began releasing games under the name ZUN Soft. He belonged to Amusement Makers, a student game development club, and the club published his first five games. The idea behind them went back to his school years. Most shoot 'em ups used military or science fiction themes. ZUN wanted a main character who was a miko, a shrine maiden, and a Shinto look.

  His first love, though, was music. ZUN played in his school's orchestra club and hoped to write music for video games. He chose college hoping to compose for fighting games, which were popular because of Street Fighter II. He knew nobody else making games who could use his music, so he made his own. The first game was meant as practice in programming.

  Development began in 1995. ZUN first showed the game in November 1996 at the 20th Hatoyama Matsuri, the annual fair on his university's Hatoyama campus. The series only became a shooter with the second game. Shooting games had regained popularity thanks to RayForce, and ZUN had long been a fan. By his own account, the series' general theme and direction began to come together only with the sixth game.

  After the fifth game, Mystic Square, ZUN graduated and the series went quiet for four years. He worked as a game developer at Taito and composed music for games made by other Amusement Makers members. In 2001 he left the group to focus on Microsoft Windows. He formed Team Shanghai Alice, a one-man dōjin circle that self-publishes every later game. ZUN describes the Windows games as a "clean slate" for the series canon, though many references carry over from the earlier computer.

  Today he handles the graphics, music and programming for the bullet hell games alone, using Visual Studio, Adobe Photoshop and Cubase. The one exception is the portrait art in Fairy Wars, which Makoto Hirasaka drew. Six fighting games were joint efforts with the developer Twilight Frontier. On those, ZUN wrote the music and story, while Twilight Frontier created the art and gameplay.

  One choice from this solo workflow drew criticism. For the game Fossilized Wonders, ZUN included images generated by artificial intelligence, and some fans objected. He said the decision was tied to the game's plot, and he affirmed a negative stance against generative AI in art.

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• 3. From PC-98 To Windows

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  The first game would be almost unrecognizable to a modern player. Highly Responsive to Prayers plays like Arkanoid rather than a shooter. The player steers a Yin-Yang Orb by swinging Reimu Hakurei's purification rod and firing amulets, aiming to flip every card in a level. Of its 20 stages, every fifth is a boss battle. After Stage 5, the player picks between two routes, Makai and Hell, each with its own stages, bosses and endings. This game also introduced the Bomb, a last-resort move that appears in some form in every later game. It set the four difficulty levels as well: Easy, Normal, Hard and Lunatic.

  Story of Eastern Wonderland arrived at the same convention and changed the direction. It is the first vertically scrolling danmaku game, a Japanese word meaning barrage or bullet curtain. ZUN cites the arcade shooter Darius Gaiden as an influence. The game also marks the first appearance of Marisa Kirisame, who shows up as the Stage 4 boss. It brought weapon selection, power-ups, midbosses, hitboxes smaller than the character and an unlockable Extra Stage. Fifty copies were sold.

  The next three games on the older PC-98 computer kept experimenting. The third, released on the 29th of December 1997, was a split-screen versus shooter in the style of Twinkle Star Sprites. Approximately 100 to 150 copies were sold. The fourth, in August 1998, was the first to use Gensokyo in its title and added a graze counter for near misses. ZUN says 200 to 300 copies were sold. The fifth, Mystic Square, came out on the 30th of December 1998 and added a Dream Gauge that rewards collecting items.

  Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, released on the 11th of August 2002 at Comiket 62, brought a dramatic graphical improvement. Its music and sounds used synthesized PCM and MIDI instead of FM synthesis. It also introduced the Spell Card system, in which each boss fires a sequence of danmaku patterns while a health bar and a unique attack name appear on screen. In the older games, bosses simply switched between a few patterns at random. The game also marks the debut of Sakuya Izayoi.

  Later games kept tinkering with the formula. Mountain of Faith, in August 2007, was a soft reboot with a rebuilt engine. It removed the bomb counter and replaced it with Options, up to four satellites that hover near the player and fire bullets. Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom offered a Pointdevice Mode that swaps lives and continues for a series of chapters. Double Dealing Character became the first game sold as a digital download, through Playism on the 10th of August 2014. Its Western debut followed on the 7th of May 2015. The series reached Steam with Hidden Star in Four Seasons on the 16th of November 2017.

  ZUN numbers the spin-offs with decimals, and they vary widely in genre. Shoot the Bullet gives the player a camera instead of a shot or bombs. In Fairy Wars, the ice fairy Cirno can freeze bullets in mid-air. Impossible Spell Card lets the player use nine cheat items as the villain Seija Kijin. The fighting game Urban Legend in Limbo became the first in the series on a console, arriving on PlayStation 4 on the 8th of December 2016.

  The twentieth mainline game was announced on the 12th of April 2025 and released on the 17th of August 2025. Its new mechanic, Incident Stones, lets the player unlock, equip and mix items that change both gameplay and the story's dialogue.

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• 4. Beauty In Bullets

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  ZUN once explained how his stories reach players with a single line: "danmaku is how the story and characters are communicated." Characters get elaborate backstories, yet little of it appears in the games themselves. He also holds that bullet hell is meant to be beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. That belief is the main reason most of the cast is female. ZUN sees a feminine charm in bullet hell that male characters would spoil, and he says the female roster should not be read as fan service. The cast now numbers over 180 characters.

  The rules are easy to describe and hard to master. Bullet power rises on a linear scale as the player collects power-ups from enemies, until it maxes out. Collecting point icons earns extra lives, and the number needed grows exponentially as the score climbs. Holding the shift key, by default, enters focus mode. This slows movement and tightens the attack. From Perfect Cherry Blossom onward, it also reveals the character's tiny hitbox.

  The graze counter rewards risk. It tracks how many bullets entered the character sprite without touching the hitbox, and each graze pays out a score bonus. The bomb, also called a spell card, makes the user briefly invulnerable, clears many bullets and heavily damages enemies on screen. A "deathbomb" lets the player fire one in the short window after being hit to avoid losing a life. That window is usually around 0.3 seconds, or 8 frames.

  Each main game also adds its own scoring item. Perfect Cherry Blossom has cherry points, which can grant a temporary shield called the supernatural border. Imperishable Night has time points, which are needed to advance to later stages. Mountain of Faith has faith points that boost the value of point items.

  Every main game offers four difficulty levels and six stages that grow harder. Story of Eastern Wonderland has only five stages. Lotus Land Story and Embodiment of Scarlet Devil lock out the sixth stage on Easy. Clearing a game without continues unlocks an Extra Stage, harder than Normal and easier than Hard. Its boss fight is especially long, usually with ten spell cards.

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• 5. The Land Sealed Away

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  ZUN's first description of Gensokyo was modest: "a remote separated land of a human village in an eastern country." He designed it as a human village tucked into remote mountain recesses of Japan. Long before the series begins, yōkai, the legendary creatures of Japanese folklore, lived alongside some humans there. After a few humans vanished into the region, many people feared the area. Others settled there to exterminate yōkai. As humans built civilization and multiplied, the yōkai worried about what that would do to the balance between the two.

  Five hundred years before Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, the yōkai sage Yukari Yakumo created the "boundary of phantasm and substance." The yōkai favored it, and it protected the balance. It was called the Yōkai Expansion Project, and it made Gensokyo a phantasmal world that automatically called out to weakened yōkai of the outside world. Things that disappear outside, such as extinct animals, lost tools and architecture, also appear inside. Neither side could confirm the other existed. Gensokyo is landlocked, so it has no seas. It is a bordering world next to its outside, not a parallel universe.

  Several decades before Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, past Hakurei miko built the Great Hakurei Barrier. It is described as a "barrier of common sense," a logical barrier that not even yōkai can pass. The yōkai opposed its construction until they understood its usefulness. The only known gateway from the outside world is the Hakurei Shrine, on the border of Gensokyo.

  Trouble arrives as "incidents," events that affect all of Gensokyo and have unknown causes when they begin. Frequently a yōkai's whim or curiosity is behind them. Usually Reimu Hakurei or Marisa Kirisame investigates, finds the perpetrators and chastises them. While a major incident lasts, spirits and fairies experience a temporary increase in power. The spell card rules exist to keep the relationship between humans and yōkai going in a mock style, which was necessary to preserve the balance.

  The population includes few humans and many kinds of yōkai. Species include magicians, beasts, vampires, tengu, mermaids and kappa. Fairies, spirits, oni and deities may also count, and all are portrayed in human female form. Heaven and Hell are reachable from Gensokyo. So is the Lunar Kingdom, a place on the Moon separated from the rest of it by its own barrier.

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• 6. Stories Between Games

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  Twelve music CDs were released as part of ZUN's Music Collection. Most are numbered by release date from Volume 1 to 10, while three short albums carry half numbers. Each holds arrangements of game music alongside new compositions. Most also include a booklet written by ZUN about a self-described "club of necromancers" in Kyoto, Japan. In those loose stories, club members Renko Usami and Maribel Hearn research topics tied to Gensokyo and the paranormal. One album, Dolls in Pseudo Paradise, tells an unrelated story about the fate of eight thieves spirited away to Gensokyo.

  In 2006 and 2007, ZUN released a five-volume collection of PC-98 soundtracks, including several unused themes. Every track gained a sixth FM synthesis channel, which had originally been reserved for sound effects.

  The print works fill in the world that the games only hint at. Curiosities of Lotus Asia is a serial novel written by ZUN, illustrated by Genji Asai and released in 26 installments. It began in January 2004 and survived the closure of several magazines. Biblos went bankrupt in April 2006, and the series moved on to a new publisher, running until October 2007. It was compiled into a book on the 30th of September 2010. The narrator is Rinnosuke Morichika, one of the few male characters in the series, who runs an antique store called Kourindou.

  Touhou Sangetsusei is a four-part manga about three mischievous fairies named Sunny Milk, Luna Child and Star Sapphire. It was serialized in Comp Ace magazine. The artist Nemu Matsukura left for health reasons in May 2006, and Makoto Hirasaka took over. The spin-off game Fairy Wars was based on it.

  Seven official fanbooks, all written by ZUN, present Gensokyo as a documented place. Bohemian Archive in Japanese Red, published on the 11th of August 2005, is made of newspaper articles by the tengu reporter Aya Shameimaru. Perfect Memento in Strict Sense is written from the viewpoint of the historian Hieda no Akyuu. It lists facts about yōkai, including their "threat levels" and suggested countermeasures. Grimoire of Marisa is presented as Marisa's scrapbook of the Spell Cards she has met.

  The seventh fanbook, Whispered Oracle of Hakurei Shrine, appeared on the 1st of April 2025. It is told from Reimu's perspective and includes O-mikuji slips for every character from the Windows era onward.

  A manga called Forbidden Scrollery follows Kosuzu Motoori, a collector of rare and dangerous demon books who works at a book lender. Yen Press published it in English in seven volumes between November 2017 and May 2019. It was the first Touhou Project print work to be officially translated.

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• 7. The Fan Explosion

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  In December 2003, seven circles sold Touhou Project derivative works at Comiket 65. These were the first derivative doujinshi, and they followed the release of Perfect Cherry Blossom. By Comiket 74 in August 2008, 885 of the 35,000 participating circles had Touhou works on display or for sale. At Comiket 77 in December 2009, 2,372 circles were dedicated to the series. That broke the record of 2,130 held by The Prince of Tennis at Comiket 66. At Comiket 85 in December 2013, Touhou still led with 2,272 circles, against 1,462 for Kuroko's Basketball.

  The tide eventually turned. From 2015 to 2017, Kantai Collection was consistently the most popular series at Comiket. By 2019, Touhou ranked fourth, with less than half the circles of the Fate series.

  The popularity has been attributed in part to ZUN's few restrictions on the use of his work. The major limits cover unauthorized commercial distribution, the spoiling of endings and a requirement to credit Team Shanghai Alice. Creators are also asked to refrain from crowdfunding. ZUN said he did not want the series officially commercialized. Fans have since attached original traits to characters that ZUN may not have intended, and he has mostly acknowledged, appreciated and even encouraged this.

  The derivatives take many forms. Kōmajō Densetsu: Scarlet Symphony parodies the Castlevania games, and Age of Ethanols borrows from Age of Empires. Touhou Puppet Dance Performance is based on the Pokémon games. Fan-made anime have sometimes included professional voice actors such as Rie Tanaka. The series was nominated at Japan's 11th annual Media Arts Awards in the Entertainment category. It lost the Grand Prize to Nintendo's Wii Sports. In 2018, a variant of the flower Lagerstroemia indica from Beijing Forestry University was named "Reimu" for its resemblance to Reimu Hakurei's outfit.

  A major Internet meme centers on yukkuris, the disembodied, deformed heads of Touhou characters. It began in late 2007 with a crude attempt to draw Reimu and Marisa in Shift JIS art. The phrase "Yukkuri shite itte ne!!!" won bronze for 2008's "Net Slang of the Year" in Japan.

  The fans themselves are young. A 2009 survey by the Comic Market Committee put the average age of Touhou fans among Comiket attendees at 24.8 years. In the 2023 popularity poll, almost 40 percent of respondents were aged 15 to 19. Music has reached beyond the fan circles too. Toby Fox, the creator of Undertale, cited Touhou as one of his musical influences.

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• 8. Bad Apple

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  For one stage theme, ZUN aimed for a song that sounded "as old-fashioned as possible." He wrote it as the Stage 3 music for the fourth game, released on the 14th of August 1998. It was later included in the collection Akyu's Untouched Score vol.1, released at the third Hakurei Shrine Reitaisai in 2006. Its title was "Bad Apple!!"

  The song surged in popularity after a 2007 arrangement by the dōjin circle Alstroemeria Records, called "Bad Apple!! feat. nomico." Masayoshi Minoshima arranged it, nomico sang, and Haruka wrote lyrics built on the English idiom for a rotten apple that spoils the barrel. The song depicts someone struggling with apathy and wanting to "change to white" or "turn to black." It came out on the album Lovelight on the 20th of May 2007 at the 4th Hakurei Shrine Reitaisai. It reportedly reached number one on the Japanese iTunes Store dance charts.

  The visual that made it famous started as a request. On the 8th of June 2008, a Niconico user named Μμ uploaded a crude storyboard video and asked for someone to animate it. On the 27th of October 2009, a user named Anira published the finished black-and-white shadow play. In it, characters such as Reimu and Marisa flow fluidly from pose to pose while dancing. It reached number one on the Niconico daily rankings on the 15th of November 2009. By March 2023 it had over 30 million views on Niconico alone. In January 2025, a YouTube upload passed 100 million views, but it was an unauthorized reprint. The community urged viewers to support the official version from Alstroemeria Records.

  The song moved into games and karaoke. A limited Taiko no Tatsujin version was shown at Niconico Chokaigi 2 in 2013. DAM began distributing it for karaoke in 2019 and JOYSOUND followed in 2020. Muse Dash added it in September 2021.

  Then the video became a test for old machines. The programmer Peter Dell, who contributed to a port, compared it to a graphical "Hello, World!" program for retro platforms. In April 2014 it ran on an IBM 5160 with an Intel 8088 processor at 640×200 and 30 frames per second. A Commodore 64 port at 12 frames per second followed in June 2014. By 2015 there were ports for the Vectrex, Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System, Sega Genesis and TI-84 Plus graphing calculators. An Arduino Mega played it without audio in 2019. Physics club students at Rokko Junior/Senior High School showed it on an oscilloscope using a Raspberry Pi.

  Other versions use unlikely materials. A user named zboy recreated it in 2023 with graphing functions in Desmos. The YouTube channel Plugla used cell painting in Excel in 2021. Stop motion has used real apples, Rubik's Cubes and Minecraft heads. Tesla coils and lasers have drawn it, and a group of traditional Japanese instrument players performed it with shamisen, koto, shakuhachi and taiko. The most recent recreation in the record, from 2024, comes from the engineer Waldemar Erk. He embedded the animation frames directly inside a font file.

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