Trivia / Metal Black

• Creator-Driven Successor: To Gun Frontier, technically. This game is referred to as Project Gun Frontier 2 in the credits, and both were indeed developed by the same team, as seen in their unique palette style and the music used in the attract demo's opening. However, Metal Black plays almost nothing like Gun Frontier, instead employing the "beam battle" weaponry that would reappear in successors such as Border Down and later Darius games.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Beyond the Sega Saturn version developed by Ving in 1996, there is no port of decent quality. The game was in Taito Legends 2 for Windows, PlayStation 2 and Xbox, and Taito Memories Jōkan for PlayStation 2, but they only support interlaced scanning and some versions have a bug that prevents you from firing a focused laser. However, an Arcade Archives rerelease has been announced in November 2022.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: There's a common theory that Metal Black was originally planned as Darius III and then given its own setting in the final days of the development, since the game features cameo appearance of several enemies from Darius. This is not true, as the reasons for Darius III's cancellation had nothing to do with the planned tone and setting (although Darius III stalling did lead its designer to make Metal Black instead), and Metal Black was slated to be a sequel to Gun Frontier (marked in the credits as "Project Gun Frontier 2") and shared the same graphical style and a good number of staff members with it, including the designer Takatsuna Senba. However, Metal Black doesn't really have anything to do with that game either; this is because Takatsuna feared that a game with dark atmosphere would not be allowed by the executives, and decided to trick them by tinkering it into a faux tie-in to unrelated game.
• Working Title: "Project Gun Frontier 2".