A Forgotten Spanish Arcade Hero Is Getting a Second Life, and He Goes Super Saiyan in the Sequel
Every so often a piece of arcade history surfaces that nobody outside one specific country ever knew existed. Thunder Hoop is exactly that — a 1990s arcade series from Spanish developer Gaelco, a studio better known (to the extent it’s known at all outside Spain) for World Rally and, bizarrely, electronic dartboards. Retro specialist QUByte Interactive is bringing both games in the series to Steam as the Thunder Hoop Collection, landing 8 October.
What Thunder Hoop Actually Is
The original 1992 game casts a genetically engineered teenage hero against armies of mutants unleashed by the suitably cartoonish villain Dr Genbreak, fighting his way across a cityscape that hits every early-90s beat-’em-up checkpoint — sewer level included, underwater section included. Standard stuff for the era, competently done, and completely unknown outside its home market until now.
The sequel is where things get properly strange. TH Strikes Back, released in 1994, ages the hero up into an adult who — in the game’s own framing — has apparently heard of shirts and decided against them. It leans much harder into run-and-gun territory, and somewhere in the middle of it all, the hero goes Super Saiyan and the entire game briefly transforms into a Gradius-style scrolling shooter. Nobody asked for a Dragon Ball Z homage stitched into a Spanish beat-’em-up sequel, and yet here we are, thirty-two years later, about to find out how it plays.
What’s Actually New in the Re-release
This isn’t just a straight port. The collection adds save states, a rewind function, and customisable screen filters for that CRT look — the now-standard toolkit for this kind of preservation release, but genuinely useful ones for a game this obscure and this unforgiving by modern standards. Multiplayer support differs between the two: the sequel gets proper local co-op, while the original’s multiplayer mode is restricted to alternating turns, exactly as it would have worked on the original cabinet.
Why This Is Worth Knowing About
Stories like this are exactly why arcade preservation work matters beyond the obvious big names. Nobody was clamouring for Thunder Hoop specifically — most people reading this have never heard of it, and that’s rather the point. It’s a genuinely weird, genuinely obscure piece of a country’s gaming history that would otherwise have simply stayed lost to anyone without a working Spanish arcade cabinet and a very specific memory. Worth a look purely out of curiosity when it lands on Steam.
