back of the player's spacecraft, or detached to fly freely. When attached, the Force provides one of three different powerful weapons, in addition to the main gun and the wave cannon. When detached, these weapons cannot be used, but the Force will instead resort to a secondary set of guns, which can be fired by the player even if the Force is at a distance from the spacecraft. The Force has a secondary use as a shield; it is completely indestructible and can block most things fired at it, as well as damage or destroy enemies on contact. The inspiration for the Force came partly from a joke, where AKIBO (the designer), was envisioning the behavior of a dung beetle. The R- in the series title stands for "ray", as in a ray of light, in reference to the many different types of rayed weapons that players use in the series. Another theory suggests that "R-Type" refers to Bydo as r-strategists in r/K selection theory. Development Development on the Commodore 64 version began when Activision's Electric Dreams Software subsidiary obtained the rights. David Jolliff was planning on to program the game with James Smart assisting in program help. The original version was shelved, and as a result of the settlement between the creators of Katakis and Activision, Manfred Trenz of Rainbow Arts had the right to do a port, which was made in six weeks. Release Hudson Soft developed a fairly accurate port of R-Type that was released for the TurboGrafx-16 (a.k.a. PC Engine) console, although it suffered from a slightly lower resolution, reduced colour palette, sprite flickering and slowdown. Due to the slightly reduced resolution, the playfield also scrolls slightly in the vertical axis whenever the player's ship approaches the top or bottom of the screen. The Japanese release was split across two game cards (HuCards) titled and and the later North American release contained the entire game on a single card. The TurboGrafx-16 version of R-Type has a boss at the end of Stage 6, rather than a prolonged wave of enemies as in all other versions. The Xbox Live Arcade game R-Type Dimensions was released on February 4, 2009, by Tozai Games. It is a port of the original R-Type and the sequel R-Type II. It can be played either with the original 2D graphics or with new 3D graphics, and has added co-op gameplay functionality. An