Seems pretty obvious to me just from “four-player, four-monitor arena battle with full eight-way scrolling and AI drones for players not present”.

And it’s clarified with “As a social experience had it been released in 1986, this would have been the grandfather to games like Fortnight; a multiplayer PvP battle arena where each player was supposed to have their own dedicated set of controls and display.”

The main question I had was what was the form of combat. There was no mention of shooting. So what was it? Ramming? Lasers? Magnetism? Bullets? Turns out it is bullets. Boring.

But they did say "a four-player game that was said to resemble Sinistar" but it would have been more accurate to have said "it's literally a 4-player version of Sinistar" and I would have had zero remaining questions.

It’s from 1986, so of course it uses bullets.

Flicky is from 1984 and uses tea cups as the projectile.

Sure, people have been putting different sprites on their projectiles for a long time. But whether it flies in a straight line, drops from the top of the screen, or follows a ballistic arc, a bullet is a bullet. It doesn’t matter what sprite you use.

Not quite. A bullet is a specific type of projectile. Arrows, rocks, and even teacups can be projectiles, but they are not bullets.