RayForce

The player is provided with a ship called the RVA-818 X-LAY, which is outfitted with two weapons: a primary weapon that fires straight lasers and increases in power when the player accumulates power-ups, and a secondary lock-on laser launcher, which can also be increased in power, that can target up to eight enemies at once by moving the targeting reticle. This weapon is used to attack enemies that appear on a lower plane than that of your craft, which are inaccessible to the player's primary weapon.

In the distant future, human governments, across the planet Earth, construct a massive supercomputer, named "Con-Human". The purpose of this computer is to govern the planet's environmental systems, verifying proper nutrients and care is provided to ensure the culture of humans and animal alike.

However, disaster strikes when, after a cloned human's mind is linked with the system, Con-Human becomes sentient and insane. It begins to induce calamities across the planet, constructing corrupt clones of existing organisms, destroying its human masters and exterminating the nature it was intended to protect, apparently intending to replace everything with what Con-Human considers improved versions of themselves.

RayForce was directed by Tatsuo Nakamura, assisted by designer and planner Tomohisa Yamashita and graphic designer Hideyuki Katou. During the mid-1990s, Japanese developer Taito had split up their development teams into three groups, one of which was the Kumagaya Research Group in Saitama; the three were moved to this division of the company. Taito specifically stated that the Kumagaya team wouldn't be able to make any shoot'em up games, to the dismay of several employees within the division; they tried multiple times to get the green light for a new shooter, but Taito executives denied these requests for not being "feasible". Even with these requests being denied, Nakamura and the others were determined to make a shooter, and decided to make a set of design documents to present to Taito higher-ups for approval.

Looking for inspiration, Nakamura turned to Taito's earlier game Master of Weapon for its aerial top-down perspective, which he thought would work well with 3D visuals. He was also inspired by Namco's Xevious, which had a targeting reticule for firing bombs at ground-stationed targets; not wanting to simply repeat this, Nakamura decided on a lock-on laser that destroyed multiple enemies at once. Before presenting them to Taito, he showed the documents to the character designers and planners for additional feedback and to iron things out. After having it polished further from the project head of the Kumagaya group, he showed the game to company management, who liked the idea and allowed development to continue.

In Japan, Game Machine listed RayForce on their April 1, 1994 issue as being the third most popular arcade unit at the time.

The Saturn version of the game received mixed reviews, with critics typically caught between its high quality design and its antiquated gameplay and stylistics. Rad Automatic of Sega Saturn Magazine stated that the game is fun but severely outdated in terms of both graphics and gameplay, though he did praise the absence of slowdown and the authentic arcade feel of the tate mode. A reviewer for Maximum similarly commented that the game falls into the retro genre without offering the nostalgia value found in most such releases, and further criticized that the tate mode "isn't very practical in execution (and not particularly healthy for your television)." While he acknowledged the game is fun, he noted it was being released alongside a host of top-quality Saturn titles (including Virtua Fighter 2 and Sega Rally Championship), and concluded, "Come on - be honest now - is this really the sort of game you coughed up £300 to play with your high-tech next generation gaming system?

Taito initially worked on a sequel named R-Gear, again using sprite-based graphics. At some point this concept was abandoned in favor of RayStorm, which instead sported polygon-based 3D graphics.

A prequel, RayCrisis, was released in 1998.