The famous sideways scroller R-Type was in fact released on the C64 by Electric Dreams, but a different version to what was originally planned and was being worked on. Our first real knowledge of something being slightly odd was after comparing the CVG magazine demo to the final release.
It was discovered that there was a whole different set of programmers working on this game at Catalyst Studios. Interestingly around the same the time, Manfred Trenz had completed Katakis, which was banned because of Activision taking out a law suit saying that Katakis was too close to their R-Type licence. A twist would occur later on, when Manfred would go on to code the eventual released conversion – a feat covered in apparently just 7 weeks. Of course, its likely many routines were just lifted and tweaked from the original Katakis source.
The original game was being developed by a chap called David Jolliff, which began well – but due to some development issues as time went on – David got behind schedule. James Smart was brought onto the project to help get the game finished, both to fix up what was present and finish other parts not yet done. James had coded the various pick up weapons and hi-score parts (possibly completion parts), but none of which he doesn’t recall getting integrated within David’s game. Both worked initially at David’s flat on the game.
James comments that the scroll routines were not brilliantly fast and the multiplexer was very glitchy and the sprites would eventually drift more slowly than the scenery around them. It was very early in James’ coding career, so he didn’t have the knowledge at the time to help fix those issues – but he did help make some optimizations to the code to improve proceedings a little.
Additionally the colours were all wrong, and there is a lack of them throughout. James confirmed a few reasons for this, firstly that Mark Jones was colour blind, and the choice of two shades of grey on reflection wasn’t the best idea. There is still no sound in the game. But Barry Leitch, who created the music for the game, recently dug out all the tunes created for the game (Which were never included with the levels). They are now available to download separately.
Activision were not happy at all with how things were going, and decided to bring the developers in-house to finish things off at Electric Dreams. At this time, Activision were in the process of taking the makers of Katakis to court. David and James were desperately trying to finish the game and get it working, but by this point – David was finding the project too much.
In 2013, Bob Pape wrote a fantastic book on his experiences of developing the Spectrum version of R-Type. Here he details a lot about the C64 conversion and has very kindly allowed us to add the details to the site, which you can now read under the Articles tab.
It was all but confirmed that Dave Jolliff and Jim Smart were eventually taken off the project due to slow progress and a lack of it. Dave sadly struggled with the sprite multiplexer in the game, and this heavily slowed things down. What didn’t help at the time was that Bob’s version was coming along very quickly without too many hitches. Bob informs us that both Dave and Jim were almost chained to their workstations to try and get the game finished towards the end, and it got too much in the end. Interestingly, there were questions about whether there were plans for Manfred Trenz to step in quite a bit before the team was dismissed. The release date seems to be approximately the 10th December 1988 – as this was when the first cracks were done.
Interestingly, when Bob saw Dave and Jim briefly whilst being “chained” down, the game was making good progress and a lot of the issues were looking like they were resolved. It is therefore believed that had they just been given the 7 weeks that Manfred was given to write a new conversion, we could have ended up with a superb version of R-Type.
According to Jim Smart though, they were actually given the 7 weeks – but regardless and without their knowledge, Activision had already arranged a deal with the Katakis coders to work on re-skinning/tweaking Katakis to become R-Type on the C64. This done in parallel whilst David and James were working on a conversion that was now never destined to be released. I agree with James in saying that this was pretty underhanded. Eventually Manfred Trenz had his conversion released instead, and the Catalyst Development version was put to rest.
As an aside – contributor Zeldin stumbled over a review for R-Type, which was in ASM magazine dated December 1988 (it came out in November), shots from the version 1 of the game are shown throughout. Reading the review suggested that the reviewers already had a fully playable game. They already gave a ‘hit’-star for it!. The game received great praise and was told to have great music. There is no proof that this means it was complete, as ASM were apparently known for reviewing incomplete games and it seems very much this was the case with R-Type.
What of the game itself? Well, C&VG had released a demo of the game on a special covertape – which looked very good indeed. But a massive find was made by Glenn Rune Gallefoss around 2003 time, when he found that he had most of the original game which he was given by an unknown source. Shockingly, most of the game was there and almost all the levels were present in preview form, although in a very early stage in some cases. This pushes past the one level preview that was only in existence. Already you’ve been able to check the game out for yourself what we have so far. In addition to Glenn’s findings, Jazzcat has passed on a Phoenix and Conquest crack which contains yet another level. In total there are about 6 levels, but level 3 is missing it’s large ship guardian!… James Smart revealed that the ship was never actually started, so its likely this was as far as the level got (but David later surprises us … see below).
This seems to be all that was ever developed of the game, and somehow was leaked out – we’re not sure how. May well have been David that leaked it in the end to a friend or someone. We managed to get hold of David in 2014, thanks to the efforts of Bob Pape, and David suggests that he had a version of Level 3 running with the ship in place, and later versions of some of the levels. He may even still have remains of the conversion, with each level apparently taking up an entire disk side! See Creator Speaks for David’s side of the story, but it seems that now the story of R-Type V1 is almost complete.
