is a 1988 shooting gallery video game developed by TAD Corporation and published in Japan by Taito, in North America by Fabtek, The game was only a moderate success in arcades, and became better known for its various home ports. Each player uses a trackball to move their character from side to side and move the crosshairs about the screen. On later board revisions, a joystick was installed instead
When converting the game to the Nintendo Entertainment System, Rare was given a Cabal cabinet but did not have access to the game's source code, so they had to play the game over and over and redraw the graphics from memory. To accommodate the many layers and sprites of the arcade game, programmer Anthony Ball used a common coding trick: swapping sprites from left to right every other frame. This has the negative side effect of causing the sprites to flicker when they reach the console's limit of eight per line, but Ball, like many programmers of the era, found this an acceptable trade-off for including all the game's content, and in a 2016 interview he said he is happy with the quality of the conversion.
The arcade version was reviewed by Clare Edgeley in Computer and Video Games magazine. She gave it a positive review, while comparing it favorably with Operation Wolf (1987) and Combat School (1987). Nick Kelly of Commodore User rated Cabal seven out of ten, comparing it favorably with Gryzor (1987) and Devastators (1988).
The ZX Spectrum version won the award for best advert of the year, according to the readers of Crash.
Legacy
The game's success inspired many Cabal clones, such as NAM-1975 (1990) and Wild Guns (1994).
Cabal was followed in 1990 by Blood Bros. with a western theme.