R-Type

About this game

On March 25, 1988, Hudson Soft put half of an arcade game on sale in Japan. R-Type, Irem's 1987 space shooter, came to the PC Engine as two HuCards, the console's small game cards: R-Type I with stages 1 to 4, then R-Type II with stages 5 to 8 on June 3. Liberta Tsukasa, a designer on the game, says it was a close call between one card and a two-part release, and the people making the game asked for two. Fitting it on one card, they judged, would have meant lowering the arcade quality a long way.

He describes his work on it as cutting design data, not drawing pictures. He opened the arcade graphics in a PC Engine graphics editor, reduced the colours and animation frames, and in some cases changed designs, as long as nobody could tell or it could be forgiven. A development tool then showed him in numbers how much he had saved. If a change had not saved as much as it looked, he put it back. One character could be cut in half, with the half copied and flipped to make the whole. He says: "Even after repeating this several times, there was no sign of it fitting on one HuCard."

The Story Behind

In 1987, on his third game at Hudson, Liberta Tsukasa and the rest of the team were handed money and sent to an arcade. "I forget whether it was about 5,000 yen or 10,000 yen each," he says. They changed all of it into 100-yen coins. The company's order was to play R-Type and try to clear it, because nobody knew for sure when the data and materials for the job would arrive. During The Kung Fu, his previous game, he had copied R-Type's giant battleship in his lunch breaks as pixel-art practice. He had no idea it would be his next job.

A few days later the designers were given an R-Type arcade machine at the office. He had expected materials to come from Irem. He thinks the programmers had already pulled the data off the machine's circuit board.

While shrinking the graphics he drew the player's ship, the R-9, for fun as the cute red mechanical rabbit from another arcade game, which he remembers as Rabio Lepus. He had misunderstood which designs the programmers would use, and the rabbit went to them with the rest of the data. Some time later the main programmer called him over, and the rabbit was on the man's monitor. "What is this?" Tsukasa redrew the R-9 at once. The programmer was a man of few words and did not really scold him. Those words alone, he says, knocked him flat.

The work ran from the morning through meals at the desk until he noticed it was time to leave, and with no end in sight he stayed until the last subway. He says: "It may well have been hard, but it wasn't really that much of a struggle." Then he admits he was making himself sound cool. One morning, at the station where he changed trains, his vision darkened and closed in, and cold sweat poured off him. He found an empty bench and sat with his eyes shut, then opened them slowly. He remembers thinking that if his sight had not come back, he could not go on working. It came back. He says that happened only once. He now describes himself as a game planner of thirty-six years.

Tricks & Tales

The boss of stage 6, the second stage on the R-Type II card, is not in the arcade game. Tsukasa says the graphics pulled from the arcade machine held quite a few designs the game never used, and stage 6 had no special boss-like enemy, so the team decided to bring one back. Splitting the game left a little room on the second card. Unused small enemies were in the arcade data too, but there was no room for them, and he says the team gave them up with a heavy heart. The boss had no name, so Hudson's side gave it one: Yajuu. A designer on another project, Mr. F, had a habit of turning "iyada!" ("no way!") into a drawn-out "yaju~", and the word became the boss's name. Tsukasa says that when he sees it, he thinks of Mr. F and not the boss.

Takahashi Meijin ("Master Takahashi") of Hudson wrote that Izumi found the arcade game's automatic demo uncool. Izumi had the staff member said to be the best at R-Type play it, and that play went in as the PC Engine demo. Iwasaki wrote that Izumi had wanted to port even the bugs that froze the game, but gave up because he thought players would not accept it.

Iwasaki also wrote that the R-Type card used a setting the PC Engine was not supposed to use, one that allowed 16 sprites (the moving pictures on screen) side by side and ran the video memory faster than it was rated. By his account NEC treated it as a one-off: it had not been known, the game was already out, this one was an exception, and it must not happen again.

Tsukasa still has a copy of the handwritten basic specification for the arcade R-Type that was given to the team for the port. He showed it on his channel only with a blur over it, saying that even now it is not something he can release on his own.