Raiden

Raiden
Title screen from the arcade game
Release Date	April 1990
Developer	Seibu Kaihatsu
Publisher	Arcade: Seibu Kaihatsu (Japan) Fabtek (North America) Liang HWA Electronics (Taiwan) IBL Corporation (South Korea) Playstation: Hamster Corporation (Japan)
Platforms	Arcade Mega Drive SNES FM Towns PC Engine CD Jaguar Lynx PC Amiga Mobile PS4 Switch

Raiden is a vertical scrolling shoot 'em up released in September 1990 by Seibu Kaihatsu for Arcades. It is the first installment in the Raiden series and Seibu Kaihatsu's first major hit.

Story

In the year AD 2090, Earth suddenly found itself under attack by alien lifeforms from outer space. As intense battles erupted across the planet, the World Allied Forces, desperate to counter this threat, salvaged and studied the remains of destroyed enemy fighters. Bringing together the world’s most skilled engineers, they developed an advanced high-altitude combat bomber: the Raiden. However, due to the Raiden's extreme performance and agility, it proved challenging for pilots to handle. In the end, only two pilots remained capable of enduring the intense demands of flying it in real combat. These elite pilots became humanity’s last line of defense, embarking on a mission to turn the tide of the alien invasion.

Japanese

AD 2090地球は、突如として現れた外字宙生命体の侵略を受けた。激戦の続く中、世界連合軍は破壊された敵の戦闘機を基に、世界中の優秀な技術者を集めて超高空戦闘爆撃機雷電を作り出したが、あまりにも高性能、高機動であったために、実戦に耐えられるパイロットは、僅か二名しか残らなかった。

AD 2090 chikyū wa, totsujotoshite arawareta gaiji chū seimei-tai no shinryaku o uketa. Gekisen no tsudzuku Chū, sekai rengō-gun wa hakai sa reta teki no sentōki o ki ni, sekaijū no yūshūna gijutsu-sha o atsumete chō kō sora sentōbakugeki-ki raiden o tsukuridashitaga, amarini mo kōseinō,-kō kidōdeatta tame ni, jissen ni tae rareru pairotto wa, wazuka ni-mei shika nokoranakatta.

Gameplay

Raiden is a vertically scrolling shooter video game in which players control a spacecraft armed with a primary, forward-firing gun, missile sub-weapons, and a limited supply of smart bombs. Players can upgrade their ship's firepower by collecting weapon items, which appear as icons dropped by specific enemies. These icons float around the center of the screen and change colors, with each color corresponding to a unique weapon type. Collecting the same weapon type repeatedly enhances its strength.

Features

Gameplay screenshot

Main weapons

• Wide Vulcan: A spread weapon that increases in width as it is upgraded, with eight power levels available.
• Lightning Laser: Fires straight laser beams with twice the damage of the Wide Vulcan, also with eight power levels.

Missiles

• Nuclear Missiles: Launch forward-moving missiles that slightly shift horizontally. They deal the highest damage among the missile options but have a lower rate of fire.
• Homing Missiles: Fire missiles that automatically target nearby enemies. These missiles have a higher rate of fire but deal less damage than Nuclear Missiles.

Special weapons

• Thermonuclear Bomb: A delayed-detonation bomb that creates a large explosion, instantly destroying smaller enemies, damaging larger enemies, and clearing all enemy bullets from the screen. Often used to evade challenging bullet patterns.
• "Starburst Attack": Available only in two-player mode, this attack is triggered when one player craft shoots the other, generating star-like projectiles that spread in a wide cone from the targeted craft. These projectiles inflict significant damage on all enemies.
• "Death Shrapnel": When a player’s craft is destroyed, its debris turns into projectiles that damage all on-screen enemies, dealing three times normal damage to bosses if in close range.

Items

• Red Item: Powers up or switches to the Wide Vulcan.
• Blue Item: Powers up or switches to the Lightning Laser.
• “M” Icon: Powers up or switches to the Nuclear Missiles.
• “H” Icon: Powers up or switches to the Homing Missiles.
• 1-UP: Grants an extra life.
• “P” Icon: Maximizes all player weapons, including missiles if equipped.
• “B” Icon: Increases the bomb stock by one, up to a maximum of seven.
• Medal: Adds 300 points to the score when collected.
• Miclus: Seibu Kaihatsu's dragon mascot, worth 3,000 points.
• Fairy: Worth 10,000 points when collected. If the player dies after collecting it, additional power-ups are dropped.

Stages

The game features eight stages, with some variations in ported versions. The Mega Drive port includes an additional bonus stage, and the PC Engine Super Raiden version adds two extra stages, bringing the total to ten. Upon losing a life, players resume from a predefined checkpoint.

At the end of each stage, players receive a stage bonus calculated by the number of medals collected during the stage multiplied by the number of bombs in the player’s inventory, then multiplied by 1,000. If either the medal or bomb count is zero, it is treated as one for scoring purposes.

After defeating the Stage 8 boss, the mission concludes, and players receive a bonus of one million points. The game then restarts from Stage 1 with increased difficulty, where enemies fire faster and more frequently. Upon completing a second cycle of eight stages, players receive two million bonus points; after the third cycle, three million, and so on. After completing ten cycles, players are awarded a maximum of ten million bonus points. For subsequent cycles (from the eleventh onward), the bonus points awarded range from seven to nine million.

The maximum achievable score is 99,999,999. Once this score is reached, players can continue playing, but the score remains capped at 99,999,999. Upon reaching this maximum score, free play is enabled, setting the credit counter to nine for all future games until the arcade machine is rebooted. This feature may be a software bug, as gameplay sample sequences prior to starting a game also become disabled until the game is turned off and on again.

Stage	Name	Boss	BGM
1	Countryside	Desert Spider	Gallantry
2	City	Flying Fox	Lightning War
3	Ocean	Phalanx MK-III	Rough and Tumble
4	Ruins	Gijido	Gallantry
5	Wasteland	Land Crown	Fighting Thunder
6	Floating Continent	Guardian	Rough and Tumble
7	Space Station	Antonov Ma-27	Lightning War
8	Enemy Final Base	Doreineji Core	Fighting Thunder
EX1*	Space Fortress	Great Spider	Original BGM 01
EX2*	Final Fortress	Shadow Janet	Original BGM 03
SP**	Special Stage	Nova	Gallantry

* Stages exclusive to the PC-Engine CD Super Raiden port.
** Stage exclusive to the Mega Drive Raiden Trad port.

Ports

Raiden was ported to many home consoles and home computers in the early 1990s. Ports made in the 21st century were released on mobile platforms and download services, in addition to ports to game consoles of the era. Some ports received different names depending on the console they were ported to.

Platform	Port name
FM Towns Marty	Raiden Densetsu (雷電伝説)
NEC PC Engine NEC TurboGrafx-16 (USA)	Raiden
NEC PC Engine CD-ROM	Super Raiden
Sega Mega Drive Sega Genesis (NA)	Raiden Densetsu/Raiden Trad
Super Famicom (JP) Super Nintendo Entertainment System	Raiden Densetsu/Raiden Trad
Atari Jaguar	Raiden
IBM-PC (MS-DOS)	Raiden
PlayStation Network Store (Japan only) PlayStation 3 PlayStation Portable	Raiden
Mobile (Android and iOS)	Raiden

The oniginal Raiden and Raiden II were included in a compilation for the PlayStation, The Raiden Project (Raiden Project in Japan). It was developed by Seibu Kaihasu and published by them on the console in Japan. Sony published The Raiden Project outside of Japan.

The MS-DOS port was coded by Nigel 'Freddy' Conroy, Steve Cullen and Martin Randall, and was spearheaded by Martin Hooley.

The original Raiden (not The Raiden Project) is available as a download from the Japanese PlayStation Network store. The downloadable version can be played on the PlayStation 3 console or PlayStation Portable.

The original Raiden is included as part of Hamster's Arcade Archives series on the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4.

Gallery

Official logo

Arcade flyer (Japan)

Mega Drive cover

Genesis cover

TurboGrafx-16 cover

PC Engine cover

PC Engine CD cover

SNES cover

Super Famicom cover

FM Towns cover

Music cover

Jaguar cover

Lynx cover

MS-DOS cover

Videos

Arcade Archives RAIDEN

Trivia

• The title in Japanese translates to "Thunder And Lightning". Rai means thunder, and den means lightning. The closest English approximation of the pronunciation is /RHY-den/, not /RAY-den/.
• The name of the Western ports on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis and Super Nintendo, Raiden Trad, uses part of the word "Tradition", which is one of the English translations of densetsu (伝説), part of Raiden Densetsu (雷電伝説), the Japanese name of these ports (along with being the FM Towns port's name).
• Out of the known Western localizations of Raiden, the Sega Genesis (Mega Drive) Raiden TradUS English-language manual has the most accurate English translation of the Japanese story:

"A.D. 2090...Suddenly the world is attacked by aliens from outer space. The world has united forces which fight back fiercely. Top world scientists have analyzed wreckage of enemy planes shot down and created a supersonic fighter bomb (sic) named "Raiden". However, since these aircrafts (sic) are so technically sophisticated, there is only one pilot in the world (The 16-bit Sega Raiden Trad is a one-player only game) able to handle it. The Raiden is just about to take off, and the fate of the entire world is depending on this Raiden!"

• In the episode 20 "The Game Center Monster" of Mysterious Nile Girl Thutmose, the boy can be seen playing the arcade version of Raiden in an amusement arcade.

External Links

• Hamster page
• Arcade Archives

References

Raiden video games
Raiden series	Raiden ● Raiden II (DX) ● Raiden III ● Raiden IV (Overkill) ● Raiden V (Story)
Raiden Fighters series	Raiden Fighters ● Raiden Fighters 2: Operation Hell Dive ● Raiden Fighters Jet (text transcript)
Compilations	The Raiden Project ● Raiden Fighters Aces ● Raiden Legacy
Other Seibu Kaihatsu/MOSS shmups	Stinger ● Scion ● Air Raid ● Viper Phase 1 ● Caladrius (Blaze) ● Raiden Nova