Raiden

About Raiden

Raiden (1990) is Seibu Kaihatsu's vertical shoot 'em up, built on cheap hardware after a flop and turned by word of mouth into a 17,000-unit arcade hit and a long-running series.

Raiden in Depth

In 2090 the alien Crystals have invaded Earth and seized most of its military hardware. The Vanquish Crystal Defense answers with the Fighting Thunder, an attack craft built on Crystal technology, and one or two players fly it through eight stages of rising difficulty. After the eighth stage the game loops back to the first, harder than before. In co-operative play, each player can fire at the other's craft to generate special projectiles that damage enemies.

Pick-ups include bombs, which wipe out enemy fire and hit a wide area, weapon power-ups and score medals. Two hidden bonuses appear: the Miclus, a boss from Seibu's 1985 game Wiz, and a fairy that releases power-ups when the player dies. A destroyed fighter's shrapnel damages nearby enemies, and continuing restarts the player at the last checkpoint.

Making Raiden

According to graphic designer Toshinobu Komazawa, later head of MOSS, Seibu Kaihatsu chose a shoot 'em up instead of a Dynamite Duke sequel to recoup that game's costs, and money was so tight that it used less powerful arcade hardware than its earlier titles. President Hitoshi Hamada led production, Tetsuya Kawaguchi was designer and programmer, and Akira Sato composed the music. Tecmo released it in Japan in April 1990, with Fabtek handling North America.

Komazawa said it earned little at first because the modest hardware lacked flashy visuals, but word of mouth built demand, and steady orders over a year took sales to about 17,000 units. Game Machine listed it as Japan's most successful table arcade unit in July 1990, and it was the country's sixth highest-grossing arcade game of 1990 and fifth of 1991. Ports followed on the PC Engine, Jaguar, MS-DOS, Lynx, Mega Drive and SNES (as Raiden Trad), and in The Raiden Project on the PlayStation. Seibu made sequels until its 2005 bankruptcy, after which MOSS, founded by its staff, took over the series.