Dragon Spirit (ドラゴンスピリット) is a 1987 vertically scrolling shooter video game developed and published by Namco for arcades. It was released by Atari Games in North America. Controlling the dragon Amur, the player must complete each of the game's nine areas to rescue the princess Alicia from the demon Zawell. Similar to Namco's own Xevious, Amur has a projectile weapon for destroying air-based enemies and a bomb for destroying ground enemies. It ran on the Namco System 1 arcade board.
Music for the game was composed by Shinji Hosoe and designed by Tatsuya Ishikawa. Hosoe, previously a graphics artist for Namco, was allowed to work on the music himself due to most of the company's composers working on Genpei Tōma Den. However, much of his work was accidentally wiped from the hardware midway through development, forcing him to start over. Ishikawa previously created character artwork for Rolling Thunder, being assigned to the project after taking an interest in the enemy designs. The game was dedicated to Shouichi Fukatani, a Namco programmer who had died a few years earlier in 1985 and worked on many of the company's older games, such as Dig Dug and Super Pac-Man.[6]
The game was ported to several home systems, including the