In October 1987 CRASH’s arcade reviewer called R-Type “undoubtedly the most impressive coin-op of the lot, and one of the hardest to get to play – because there’s almost always a crowd round the cabinet!” A colleague went further: the graphics were “full of the sort of things you find at the bottom of packets of stale crisps and the liquorice all-sorts that nobody wants.” Irem’s shoot-’em-up sent a single R-9 fighter against the Bydo Empire, whose creatures are part animal and part machine, and gave the player an unusual weapon: a pod that could be fixed to either end of the ship, fired off across the screen and called back again. A year later Sinclair User opened its preview of the Spectrum conversion with “R-Type on the Spectrum? They must be mad!”
Fast facts
- Developer: Irem; arcade release 1987, on Irem’s M72 board (see the Irem entry for the hardware).
- The ship: the R-9, flying right through eight horizontally scrolling levels.
- Weapons: the Force, a detachable pod, and the Wave Cannon, a charged shot.
- Home versions in Britain: published by Electric Dreams, a label of Activision (renamed Mediagenic in 1988), from late 1988.
- Sequels: R-Type II (arcade, 1989), R-Type Leo (arcade, Japan only), R-Type III (Super Nintendo), R-Type Delta (PlayStation, 1999) and R-Type Final (PlayStation 2, 2003).
The Force
CRASH described the pod in 1987 before it had a settled English name. A “distinctive legged sphere” drifted onto the screen; shooting it released an add-on that could follow the ship loosely or be “connected to either end of the ship by pressing the ATTACH button”. Pressing ATTACH again jettisoned it across the screen, “useful for clearing out infested areas and going round corners”. British magazines called it the add-on, the probe or the force drone. Later accounts call it the Force.
What made it more than a power-up was that nothing could destroy it. Retro Gamer described “the indestructible, detachable satellite known as the Force weapon”, which added to the ship’s firepower when fixed to the front or rear and could be “launched across the screen” at the enemy. ACE noted that, attached, “it acts like a shield”. Shooting the carrier again and collecting the icon it left behind, CRASH explained, increased the add-on’s firepower or gave the ship extra speed, missiles or a shield. The Commodore 64 box listed the options: reflection laser, anti-aircraft laser, homing missiles, extra speed and shield orbs, the two small “Bits” that float above and below the ship. Sinclair User singled out the lasers “which bounce around all over the shop”.
Much of the game’s strategy comes from where the Force is at any moment. Retro Gamer’s 2004 retrospective noted that the first guardian was “ridiculously easy to beat (simply fire your Force Orb into its stomach and relax)”; the later ones had to be studied before their weak points could be found.
The Wave Cannon
The ship’s own gun could be charged. CRASH explained that holding the fire button down and letting go released “a more deadly beam”, and Your Sinclair described the effect on the Spectrum: “You can see the nose of the ship collecting surrounding atoms of some description – then when you release the button again, a large fireball zooms out.” The charge had a cost, as Retro Gamer put it: “many a life was lost at the hands of a lowly generic drone while compulsively waiting for the damn thing to charge.”
The Bydo
The enemy made the game’s reputation as much as its weapons did. CRASH found “some of the later, more organic, palpitating levels … truly revolting”. Sinclair User described “weird and wonderful Gigeresque alien constructions”, after H. R. Giger, the Swiss artist who designed the creature in Alien, and Retro Gamer later wrote of designs that “could rival the works of H.R. Giger”.
Each of the eight levels ends with a guardian, which CRASH noted was “often occupying more than half the screen”. The first, a monster now known as Dobkeratops, became the series’ emblem and appears on most of its boxes and flyers. The third level is a single enemy: a Bydo battleship long enough to fill the whole stage, which, as Your Sinclair put it, “you have to fly along and blow up a bit at a time”. An Irem developer, in an interview later translated into English, named that ship first among the things the team was proud of: “the huge battleship in stage three, the erotic-yet-grotesque enemy designs, the wave cannon… our goal at Irem is to impress you!”
The game was hard. Retro Gamer said players had to “memorise and find a safe route through each of the game’s eight levels”, and that losing a life stripped away the firepower built up so far, leaving “a ridiculously tough challenge that wasn’t for the faint hearted”. It also noticed that R-Type moved slowly compared with other shooters of its day: the difficulty lay in steering through the scenery, not in reacting to speed.
Home conversions
In Britain the home licence belonged to Activision, which published the conversions under its Electric Dreams label at £9.99 on cassette for the 8-bit machines and £24.99 for the Atari ST and Amiga. Activision defended the licence hard. In autumn 1988 it objected to Katakis, a German shoot-’em-up ZZAP!64 described as “very much in the R-Type mould”, and U.S. Gold withdrew it; ACE reported that Activision was “scrutinising five games from other software houses” at the time. The Irem entry tells the rest, including how Katakis’s programmers came to write the official Amiga version.
The conversions were uneven, and the surprise was which one came out best.
ZX Spectrum
Sinclair User named Bob Pape as “the man behind the Spectrum version” in October 1988, and reported that the programmers had commuted to London from their base in Swansea to play the coin-op “until they could get the proper feel for the game”, until Activision supplied a machine “to save their rail expenses”. Pape later wrote that this was made up. By his account the team made a single day trip to see the coin-op in London arcades, and he did his own playing on an arcade R-Type board in the Fareham office of Karl Jeffrey’s company Images, where he moved to write the conversion. Speed was the brief: “Every single routine had to be tweaked and optimised … again and again until the game was as fast as possible.” The game used colour freely in its scrolling backgrounds and kept the charge shot, which needed its own keyboard scan.
The reviews were the best the conversions received.
| Magazine | Score | Issue |
|---|---|---|
| CRASH | 92%, CRASH Smash | Christmas Special, December 1988 |
| Sinclair User | 90% | December 1988 |
| ACE | 871 | December 1988 |
| The Games Machine | 90% | February 1989 |
CRASH called it “the arcade conversion of the decade (well at least the past three months)” and noted that colour was “used very liberally, but even the resulting clashes don’t spoil the detailed, fast-moving sprites”. Sinclair User thought it “possibly the best space shoot-’em-up conversion ever”. Your Sinclair’s reviewer admitted that he had greeted the idea with “R-Type? Oh yeah?” and had “never been more wrong”: “An unmissable shoot ’em up. As addictive as Angel Delight and twice as butterscotchy.”
It was a multiload, loading each level or pair of levels from tape, and the first release was not quite complete. When Your Sinclair scored it 98% on Ocean’s compilation The Biz in March 1990, it explained that “when the game first appeared, Activision put Level Seven on twice”, and that the compilation finally included the eighth level. Reissued at £2.99 on the Hit Squad budget label, it was still, for Your Sinclair in January 1991, “the best blaster ever”.
Other versions
- Commodore 64: ZZAP!64 gave it 72% in March 1989. It liked the “smooth scrolling and decent sprites” but not the “disastrous multiload” or the “annoying tune (which can’t be turned off)”.
- Atari ST: The Games Machine gave it 82% in February 1989, praising the feeling of power once the ship was fully armed.
- Amiga: Factor 5’s version reached 86% in Amiga Computing in August 1989: “R-type is the benchmark by which other games of this ilk must be judged.”
- PC Engine: Hudson Soft’s conversion was released in Japan in 1988. The Games Machine found its scrolling, explosions and sprites “astonishing” on a console that loaded games from a credit-card-sized ROM card. The game came on two cards, and players had to buy both for the full game.
- Sega Master System: Julian Rignall gave it 87% in Computer and Video Games in March 1989.
Legacy
Retro Gamer argued in 2005 that R-Type “finally proved decent home conversions of the finest arcade games were actually possible”. Wireframe noted in 2019 that after it, “every other game in the genre had to have a gimmicky weapon of its own”. Irem kept the series going until 2003’s R-Type Final, which Retro Gamer described as packing “recognisable nuances wrapped up in a bio-mechanical skin”, and in which Dobkeratops reappears, kept alive in a giant tank.
Sources
- CRASH issue 45, October 1987, pp. 135–136, arcade column: R-Type from “IREM Corporation”; eight levels, guardians “often occupying more than half the screen”, the charged beam, the add-on and the ATTACH button, “most impressive coin-op of the lot”, “stale crisps”.
- Sinclair User issue 79, October 1988, p. 26: preview, “R-Type on the Spectrum? They must be mad!”; pp. 86–87: conversion feature (Bob Pape, the programmers’ trips from Swansea, the speed brief, the separate keyboard scan for the charge).
- Bob Pape, It’s Behind You: The Making of a Computer Game (2013), p. 35: the day trip to the Electrocoin test site in Tottenham Court Road and an Oxford Street arcade; p. 58: the arcade R-Type board at Images in Fareham; p. 72: the Sinclair User feature, “complete nonsense and a lot of it just plainly made up”, including the commuting from Swansea.
- ZZAP!64 issue 43, November 1988, p. 11: Katakis withdrawn after Activision’s objection.
- ACE issue 15, December 1988: Activision “fiercely protective of its R-Type licence”; p. 50, Spectrum R-Type review (the probe “acts like a shield”), ACE rating 871.
- CRASH issue 59, Christmas Special 1988, pp. 26–27: Spectrum R-Type review, 92%.
- Sinclair User issue 81, December 1988, p. 90: Spectrum R-Type review (“Gigeresque”, the lasers, the multiload, 90%).
- Your Sinclair issue 37, January 1989, p. 42: Spectrum R-Type review.
- The Games Machine issue 8, July 1988, PC Engine feature: Hudson’s R-Type.
- The Games Machine issue 15, February 1989: R-Type reviews, Atari ST 82%, Spectrum 90%.
- ZZAP!64 issue 47, March 1989, p. 73: Commodore 64 R-Type review, 72%, and weapons list.
- Julian Rignall, Computer and Video Games issue 89, March 1989, p. 95: Master System R-Type, 87%.
- Simon Rockman, Amiga Computing vol. 2 no. 3, August 1989, p. 28: Amiga R-Type review, 86%.
- Your Sinclair issue 51, March 1990, p. 53: The Biz compilation review; R-Type rated 98%, the missing eighth level.
- Your Sinclair issue 61, January 1991, p. 84: Hit Squad budget reissue at £2.99; the level-long battleship.
- Retro Gamer issue 1, 2004, p. 235, “The Penny Drops”: the R-Type series, the Force and Bits, the first guardian, the difficulty; and the PC Engine version needing two HuCards.
- Retro Gamer issue 21, 2005, pp. 34–39, R-Type series retrospective: the indestructible Force, the Wave Cannon, the Giger comparison, Dobkeratops, the level 3 battleship, the home conversions, R-Type Final.
- “Remembering Irem”, Wireframe issue 18, July 2019, pp. 50–51: the translated developer quote; R-Type’s influence on the genre.