THE HISTORY OF: R•TYPE
Many games have unforgettable moments, but few have moments that transcend the game itself and become iconic of the entire genre. R-Type is one of those games – a game which stands alongside the likes of Scramble and Gradius as a milestone in the evolution of the horizontal shoot-’em-up, and a game which has been plundered repeatedly by imitators. But then, the game’s own successors have leaned just as heavily on the most memorable parts of the original game, while evolving just enough to ensure that the series has always represented the best that the genre has to offer.
R-Type is a horizontal shoot-’em-up that pits the player against the evil forces of the Bydo Empire – later established to be living weapons, created by humanity. According to a developer interview from Gamest magazine, translated by shmuplations.com, the genre was chosen as a way to show off the developer’s new 16-bit arcade hardware. In many ways, R-Type was similar to other games in the genre such as Gradius, challenging not only the player’s reflexes but also their memory, as there are optimal ways to play each stage and death can cost you your power-ups. But R-Type carved out a distinct identity thanks to some mechanical innovations and memorable stage design.
The first of these innovations was the Wave Cannon attack, a powerful shot achieved by holding the fire button for a few seconds. “The Wave Cannon is a mechanism that allows for strong attacks without power-up items,” says Kazuma Kujo, who joined Irem in the late Eighties during the development of R-Type II, and has been involved in the series’ development since R-Type Delta. “I think this function was lucrative in creating a strategy against hostiles that can instantly target the player’s weak spots.” Though he wasn’t directly involved in creating the game, Kujo remembers the insight of those that were. “In regard to the Wave Cannon, while the beam it fires is important, the charge gauge at the bottom of the screen is also crucial. The developers told me that the reason they chose to use such a long gauge for the charge despite working under strict hardware limitations was to express the charging of the energy in a more dynamic way. I even heard that the gauge’s maximum length was meant to match the length of the beam at maximum charge.”
While the Wave Cannon is memorable, the Force is the signature mechanic of the series. This drone unit can attach to the front or back of the R-9A Arrowhead ship you pilot, or be deployed as a floating, semi-autonomous unit. In the interview, the designer refers to it as a joke born from the idea of a dung beetle – and that you would power up the ball, rather than the ship, with Laser Crystals. “It takes some skill to master, but I think it’s interesting how the changing of its position was expressed and that the fun of this game is that you couldn’t change the Force’s position from the front to the rear with a press of a button. The process of mastering this is the fun of playing ,” says Kujo, before divulging some more details from the original team. “At the beginning of development it seemed it was difficult for the Force to be understood as an ‘ally’. At the start, it wasn’t surrounded by metal rods as it is now. It seems that these rods ended up being devised to make the Force not look like an enemy unit. I also was told by someone who was in charge of development at the time that the Force’s mechanic of appearing from the left side of the screen was so that it wouldn’t be mistaken as an enemy.”
