[GDN] Soldner X does have an extremely long title. Can you tell is where it comes from and what it means?

[SQS] There are quite a few Japanese (shooting) games that carry German names and we wanted something unique for our game. As SideQuest Studios is German based, we had the idea to give our project a German title as well. After a lot of discussion we decided on Söldner-X: Himmelsstürmer.

“ Söldner” is the German word for “Mercenary”, while “ Himmelsstürmer” can be defined as “someone who has set his mind to defy the impossible, whose true-life enemies and goals seemingly represent on real obstacles”. Both words match the story of the game very well as the pilot is a mercenary and one of the last chances for survival of mankind.


[GDN] The game itself leans a lot towards the shoot ’em ups of yesteryear. What was it in particular that made Sidequest to go down this road as an initial genre to release in?

[SQS] First of all, we are all huge fans of this genre, many of us have wanted to work on a classical shooting game for some time. In general this genre used to be very popular in the arcades one or two centuries ago, but with more and more companies focusing only on large scale releases nowadays, there are less and less interesting shoot ’em ups emerging, especially if you look outside of Japan.

With Soldner-X we wanted to combine such classical gameplay with a fresh state-of-the art look and feel. When we started working on Soldner-X, there has been no other HD shmup on any console that could be compared with our gameplay, so we felt there was a market for it as there are still a lot of fans out there that enjoy this genre.