Most arcade games in 1987 asked you to react. R-Type asked you to think. It looked like a shoot ’em up. The spaceship moved horizontally across the screen. Enemies appeared and needed to be destroyed. The basic vocabulary was familiar. Everything underneath it was something else entirely.
R-Type was developed by Irem and released in arcades in 1987. It was ported to virtually every home platform of the era — the PC Engine conversion is considered one of the best home ports of any arcade game from the period, and the Mega Drive version is the one many British players encountered first. But the game’s soul is the arcade original, and understanding R-Type means understanding what Irem was trying to do with it.
The Force
The Force is the thing. A detachable pod that sits in front of or behind your ship, absorbing enemy bullets and serving as a secondary weapon depending on which power-up you’ve collected. You can detach it and leave it on screen as a stationary turret while you manoeuvre around it. You can use it to squeeze through gaps that your ship alone couldn’t survive. You can send it ahead into danger while you hold back and assess what’s coming.
No other shoot ’em up had anything quite like it. The Force transformed R-Type from a game about shooting things into a game about spatial reasoning. The question wasn’t how fast you could react — it was how well you understood the geometry of what was in front of you. Where to position the Force. When to detach. When to call it back. The best R-Type players looked almost unhurried, moving with deliberate precision rather than frantic speed, because they’d already worked out what was going to happen before it did.
The Design
R-Type’s level design is where Irem’s ambition is most visible. The game’s aesthetic draws heavily on the biomechanical imagery of H.R. Giger — the alien structures are organic and industrial simultaneously, built from what looks like bone and metal fused together. The Bydo Empire, the game’s enemy faction, isn’t just malevolent. It’s wrong in a way that’s harder to articulate. Playing through R-Type feels like navigating something alive rather than something built.
The boss encounters are extraordinary. Each one is a spatial puzzle as much as a combat challenge. The first boss — a vast spacecraft that fills most of the screen — has to be dismantled piece by piece in the correct sequence. Later bosses require you to find specific weak points while managing the Force and avoiding attack patterns that fill almost every inch of available space. None of it is fair in the conventional sense. All of it is learnable.
The difficulty is the point. R-Type is a game about memorisation and mastery. The first time you encounter a section, you die. You learn what’s there. You try again, armed with that knowledge. Gradually — slowly, sometimes agonisingly slowly — the game becomes navigable. The satisfaction of a clean run through a section that killed you repeatedly is the specific pleasure R-Type offers and does better than almost anything else.
The PC Engine Version
The PC Engine port, released in two parts in Japan in 1988, is the conversion that serious players point to. Hudson Soft took the arcade original and reproduced it on hardware that, strictly speaking, shouldn’t have been able to handle it. The result was close enough to the original that it set the standard for home conversions — other ports were judged against it.
The PC Engine library is available via Nintendo Switch Online’s expansion pack, which means R-Type on PC Engine is currently the most accessible legitimate route to the game. R-Type Dimensions EX on Steam includes both R-Type and R-Type II with a toggle between original graphics and a 3D remaster — the original mode is the one to play.
What Came After
The R-Type series continued through R-Type II (1989), R-Type III: The Third Lightning (1993, SNES), R-Type Delta (1998, PS1), and R-Type Final (2003, PS2). Each iteration refined and expanded the formula without substantially changing what made it work. R-Type Final 2, released in 2021, is the most recent entry — a crowdfunded project developed by Granzella, one of the studios formed from former Irem staff after the company exited the home console market.
We covered the R-Type DX remaster when it was announced for modern platforms earlier this year — see our R-Type DX piece for the current release context.
Where to Play It Now
Nintendo Switch Online (Expansion Pack): R-Type on PC Engine — the closest to the definitive home version without original hardware.
Steam: R-Type Dimensions EX — R-Type I and II, toggle between original and 3D graphics, £7.19. The most straightforward option for PC players.
Original hardware: The PC Engine is the system to seek out. PC Engine consoles appear on eBay for £80-150. The HuCard format for software is compact and robust. A PC Engine with an R-Type HuCard is one of the cleanest retro gaming setups you can own.
Check PC Engine consoles on Amazon UK →
Looking Back is a monthly series revisiting games that mattered. Previous: Sensible Soccer (1992). Next: Head Over Heels. For more on the shoot ’em up genre, see our R-Type DX: Coming to Modern Platforms news piece.