Phoenix is a 1980 fixed shooter video game released by Taito for Japanese arcades. The player controls a space ship shooting at incoming enemies that fly from the top of the screen down towards the player's ship. There are five stages which repeat endlessly. The fifth is a fight against a large enemy spaceship, making Phoenix one of the first shooters with a boss battle, an element that would become common for the genre.

The game was created in Japan by an unknown developer. Following the game's release in Europe and Japanese arcades in 1980, Phoenix was distributed in the United States by Centuri, where it helped the company turn a profit after a loss the previous year. Atari, Inc. contracted the rights to develop a home port for the Atari 2600 and sued Imagic for their game Demon Attack, which they felt was too similar to Phoenix. The 2600 version was released in 1983.

The Atari port of Phoenix received positive reviews from contemporary video game publications such as Electronic Games, Electronic Fun with Computers and Games, and The Video Game Update with some reviews in Blip, JoyStik and Video Games felt it was not as strong as the similar game Demon Attack on the Intellivision. Retrospective reviews of the arcade game from Eurogamer and AllGame praised the game as expanding on formulas established in earlier shooter games.

Phoenix is a fixed-screen shooter, set in space. The player maneuvers left and right to avoid objects such as missiles and charging enemies. A force field can be used by the player to protect them from these attacks. The force field only lasts a few seconds and then cannot be used for approximately five seconds after.

The game consists of five stages. In each of the first two, the player must destroy a formation of small phoenixes, some of which will dive toward the player's ship in an attempt to destroy it. For the third and fourth stages, the player faces a group of eggs that veer back and forth across the screen before hatching into large phoenixes. Eggs can be destroyed with one shot, while the phoenixes must be hit in the body; if a wing is hit, it will regenerate after a few seconds. In the fifth stage, the player confronts a large fortress and must shoot through both its hull and a rotating shield band in order to destroy its pilot, all the while fending off attacks by small phoenixes. Once the fortress is destroyed, the cycle begins again with increased difficulty One life is lost every time the player's ship is hit by an enemy or missile without having the force field up; once all lives are lost, the game ends.

Switches are available on the arcade machine to the operator of the machine that can adjust gameplay. These switches allow the number of initial lives in the game to range between three and six, while other switches control what score is required to earn an extra life.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, several game companies made outer-space themed shooter games, which involved players destroying alien space fleets. These games generally shared the traits of enemies slowing approaching towards the player from the top of the screen and attacking the player. Phoenix was one of the games following this trend.

Phoenix was initially developed in Japan. Japanese creators of video games were often denied credit for work by their companies out of fear they would go and work for rivals. The original developer of Phoenix is unknown. The rights to the game for distribution were owned by several companies, including Amstar Electronics who were based in Phoenix, Arizona. Centuri entered into a licensing agreement with Amstar Electronics to release Phoenix in the United States, Canada, and Central and South America. Centuri had previously been Allied Leisure Industries, with Ed Miller becoming the company's president in 1980. Prior to working at Centuri, Miller had worked for Taito, where he had arranged a deal with to license Space Invaders (1978) to Bally Manufacturing.