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After watching some gameplay of Turrican[0], which came out in 1990, I'm convinced it is heavily inspired by the NES Contra (1987).

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7jP0qQgL-c

Turrican being a robot, and the developer being from Germany leads me to believe it may have been inspired by NES Probotector[1] rather than Contra. PS, watching that now I know the struggle of 50hz gamers playing slow games was real... yikes.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcAjDFvVvaY

A couple of those could be considered "inspired by" if you (a) squint and (b) ignore all the examples that are clearly the same ;)

I played the duke nukem 1 & 2 shareware _back in the day_ but I missed out on Turrican thanks for sending me down this rabbit hole.

That's pretty funny. Although, to be honest, I think a lot of the shareware platform games from that era were seen as low budget knock-offs of more famous games on the consoles and 8/16-bit home computers.

Fair usage applies :D