When interests collide

Today I found a neat link to an interview with the creators of the classic shoot 'em up series known as R-Type. R-Type has always been one of my favourite side scrolling shooter franchises...I find it's at just the right difficulty, controls and looks great, and also incorporates some really interesting game mechanics. The coolest mechanic within the R-Type series is the Force item. It's an addition to your ship that you can upgrade with different powers, directly launch at enemies, and also place on either the back or front of your ship, depending on where you feel you need more firepower or cover.

The main thing that drives me besides video gaming is entomology. I love insects and have worked with them and around them for almost 5 years, and started taking a strong interest in them around 8 years ago as I was working through my undergraduate degree in Zoology. In particular, I developed a fondness for beetles...they're just so damn cool and diverse! You may be asking yourself why I'm mentioning this in the same article as R-Type. Well, it turns out that the main inspiration for the Force item in the R-Type series was, in fact, a type of beetle! A dung beetle, to be precise. Here's the excerpt and photos from this portion of the translated interview:

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A comparison of the Force and a dung beetle with its payload. 

 

ABIKO (Designer): It started out as a joke, but our idea for the Force came from the dung beetle. We were thinking of a system where you wouldn’t power up your own ship, but would instead power up the ball of dung. We wanted something where two players could play simultaneously within the same screen and fight together, basically. Our programmer AKIO is a hardcore Gradius player, so we were very conscious of the existence of Gradius. If we were going to make a horizontal STG, we knew it would get compared to Gradius, so we were thinking about what we could do differently.

By the time we were asked to start coding, there had been many revisions and changes to the original game design. For example, we originally wanted to make the Force capable of deployment in 4 positions on your ship: front, back, top, and bottom. But it turned out to be too difficult to program, so we left it only front and back. The powerups changed almost completely too. At first we had typical STG weapons like a 3-way shot, but we felt that this wouldn’t distinguish our game enough from Gradius, so we added the reflecting laser. That was a real pain to code. [Laughs]

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If you're interested, you can read the rest of the interview here! There are some neat little tidbits about the R-Type series that I never had any idea about...such as what the hell the "R" in the title stands for!