Retro Gaming Culture

If it’s one thing we know about Richard Evans (aka: Retro Rich), he is one dedicated gamer! We have been keeping an eye on Rich’s high score record attempts on Twin Galaxies, and we can now reveal that Rich has achieved (yet again!) another high score record, this time it’s on the awesome Irem shoot’em up, R-Type.

With a swag of Twin Galaxies high score records to his name, we thought we’d chat to Rich while he takes a breather from his next record attempt and ask how he found the R-Type arcade game and what was his regime to becoming a high score record holder on this great shmup. Strap yourself in and enjoy your R-9 flight!

AUSRETROGAMER [ARG]: Hey Rich, we heard that you got yourself the brilliant horizontal shoot’em up R-Type – why that game and what is it about R-Type that made you hunt it down?
Retro Rich [RR]: My first console was the Sega Master System, and one of the first games I got for it was R-Type. I remember playing it a lot even though I found it extremely difficult. I loved the gameplay and music. I know now that it was a pretty good conversion from the arcade game considering the technical limitations of the Master System. I really wasn’t very good at it! I think I only ever made it to Stage 4 back in those days. Once I got back into gaming and then into arcade collecting, I realised that I may be able to actually own the original R-Type arcade game – so my hunt began on the forums to see if I could get one.

ARG: How hard was it to find and then buy the game?
RR: Once I started looking on the forums, I discovered that the arcade board came in two main types. Quite often, the Irem golf game Major Title was converted to an R-Type by making numerous modifications to the circuit board and replacing the ROMs. There is even a way to make the same board run both R-Type and R-Type 2 with a selector – which is pretty cool! These boards are quite common and can go for quite a bit of money. However, I wasn’t interested in playing the second instalment and there was something alluring about owning the original Irem R-Type board rather than the conversion, so my search continued.

I posted in the wanted section of the UKvac forum and waited. After a week or two I was contacted by a collector who lives North-West of Birmingham, a good 3 hours drive from my place in the South-East of the UK. The seller had an original R-Type board in a Video Wizard JAMMA cab which he had thought about selling for the right price. He also had an R-Type marquee made for the cab which looked super cool! We negotiated a bit and settled on a price for the complete cabinet. I hired a van through a friend and set off that weekend to pick it up! I also decided to buy an original Sega Shinobi arcade board from him which I also picked up.

It took me a whole day driving and I called in a few favours, but it was well worth it! I was pretty lucky really. I got it for a really good price. The arcade board itself goes for a lot of money, and since I got this one I’ve seen them go for substantially more so I got a fantastic deal. The Video Wizard cabinet is really well made too, and he’d just had the monitor serviced so the picture is really good.

ARG: You have been busy lately breaking the Twin Galaxies high-score record for R-Type (Congratulations!) – how does one go about doing this? What was your regime?
RR: I was able to get to stage 4 on one life, but I knew I needed to do much better. R-Type, like a lot of games, has very little random elements to it. The stages behave the same, the enemies appear in the same place on the stages every time. The things which change are their rate and speed of fire as the game reacts to how well you’re doing and responds with faster enemy bullets, which makes it more difficult the better you are playing. However, learning the enemy patterns is the key to this game. Knowing where to be on the screen to destroy the enemies quickly and maximise your points while avoiding obstacles and other enemies, is what I began to learn.

I started studying other gameplay videos on YouTube to get tips. During this, I realised I’d managed to learn quite a few of the techniques myself at different points in the game, but I learned quite a few more by watching these videos. I point press quite a bit on the earlier stages in order to maximise my score.

I realised that learning to play the later stages on the arcade hardware was very time consuming. I found that I could easily do the earlier stages, but I had to do them all over again each time in order to practice a few minutes of the later ones. This was slowing my progress significantly, so I turned to MAME. I installed MAME and the R-Type ROM’s and bought myself an arcade stick. I was then able to use the save state feature within MAME to play to stage 4, save the state and then play stage 5 over and over to learn the patterns. Once I’d mastered stage 5, I did the same with stage 6. I played it so many times, learning the best way to get through the stages while maximising my points. Stage 6 is a good example of this, since the yellow enemies on this stage are worth 1000 points each, so it’s worth trying to destroy as many as possible rather than simply avoiding them.

To answer the other part of your question, I practised for 3 to 4 hours per night several nights a week around my other commitments.

ARG: How long did it take to get to a point where you were happy with your score?
RR: I got R-Type in January 2016, so I have been practising since then! However, I’ve only been seriously going at it for the last month or two. Once I started using MAME my score improved by leaps and bounds. I won’t go into the details of my point pressing (the video is on Twin Galaxies for those interested), but I died strategically at certain points to play certain parts of the game over and over until down to one life. I then continued to play through further stages on that remaining life. This meant that there was little room for error. I lost count of the times I played for 20 minutes or more on the arcade game, only to have to start over again. That was very frustrating!

Currently I am able to play the game to stage 7 on one life.

ARG:  What is your plan going forward for R-Type (an even high score)?
RR: My plan now is to learn stage 7 of the game as it is extremely difficult. After that, I will learn stage 8. I’m giving myself a little break as I don’t want to burn out or get annoyed. One of the main things I’ve realised about trying to achieve high scores on games is that if you have a few bad games, stop playing. Come back to it another day, don’t keep going as you’ll only get annoyed and frustrated. It’s hard to walk away sometimes, but you have to really be strict with yourself as it doesn’t do you any good to continue when that happens.

My next personal goal is to complete the game on one credit. After that I intend to do it with one life. The game loops back to stage one again after the first completion, and then it goes all the way to stage 8 again. Once the second loop is complete, the game finishes which means there is a natural ending and therefore point pressing will start to play a major part to maximising the score.

I will begin working on this soon, as I want to keep up with the momentum I have. My current record score is not that high. I’ve seen videos of people achieving much higher scores on R-Type, both on original hardware and with MAME. They have simply not submitted their score to Twin Galaxies as I have. It’s a nice milestone to achieve the record, but I realise I still have a long way to go to become a truly great R-Type player.

ARG: Are you eyeing any other Twin Galaxies high score records you want to break or is that a secret?
RR: No secret at all *smiles* I think R-Type is going to keep me busy for some time yet, but after that I may start to learn Shinobi. I have a score on Twin Galaxies already, but it’s very low. Since I submitted that score, it raised awareness of the game and a guy called Jonathan Town has set a much higher score, which is great. I feel happy that I got him involved actually. It’s what competitive gaming is all about in my opinion. What’s the point in being the only score on the board and not trying to improve? Jonathan has given me loads of tips so I’m sure I can improve my score on Shinobi, although I’m not confident I will ever be as good as him. He is quite amazing at it!

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before someone else submits a higher score for R-Type. I’ve raised awareness of that game too, since the previous record was set in 1997 by Jason Wilson. He may well come back to reclaim his title, or maybe someone else will have a go. That’s why I need to seriously up my game so I can set an even higher score and remain on top!

As we leave Rich to rest his hands and fingers, we can’t help it think that this will not be the last time we see his name up in lights.