Space Harrier
is a 1985 rail shooter video game developed and published by Sega for arcades. It was originally conceived as a realistic military-themed game played in the third-person perspective and featuring a player-controlled fighter jet, but technical and memory restrictions resulted in Sega developer Yu Suzuki redesigning it around a jet-propelled human character in a fantasy setting. The arcade game is controlled by an analog flight stick while the deluxe arcade cabinet is a cockpit-style linear actuator motion simulator cabinet that pitches and rolls during play, for which it is referred as a taikan or "body sensation" arcade game in Japan.
It was a commercial success in arcades, becoming one of Japan's top two highest-grossing upright/cockpit arcade games of 1986. Critically praised for its innovative graphics, gameplay and motion cabinet, Space Harrier is often ranked among Suzuki's best works. It has made several crossover appearances in other Sega titles, and inspired a number of clones and imitators, while Capcom and PlatinumGames director Hideki Kamiya cited it as an inspiration for him entering the video game industry.
Space Harrier has been ported to over twenty different home computer and gaming platforms, either by Sega or outside developers such as Dempa in Japan and Elite Systems in North America and Europe. Two home-system sequels followed in Space Harrier 3-D and Space Harrier II, and the arcade spin-off Planet Harriers. A polygon-based remake of the original game was released by Sega for the PlayStation 2 as part of their Sega Ages series in 2003.
Gameplay
Space Harrier is a fast-paced rail shooter game played in a third-person perspective behind the protagonist, set in a surreal world composed of brightly colored landscapes adorned with checkerboard-style grounds and stationary objects such as trees or stone pillars. At the start of gameplay, players are greeted with a voice sample speaking "Welcome to the Fantasy Zone. Get ready!", in addition to "You're doing great!" with the successful completion of a stage. The title player character, simply named Harrier, navigates a continuous series of eighteen distinct stages while utilizing an underarm jet-propelled laser cannon that enables Harrier to simultaneously fly and shoot. The objective is simply to destroy all enemies—who range from prehistoric animals and Chinese dragons to flying robots, airborne geometric objects and alien pods—all while remaining in constant motion in order to dodge projectiles and immovable ground obstacles.Fifteen of the game's eighteen stages contain a boss at the end that must be killed in order to progress to the next level; the final stage is a rush of seven past bosses encountered up to that point that appear individually and are identified by name at the bottom of the screen. The two other levels are bonus stages that contain no enemies and where Harrier mounts an invincible catlike dragon named Uriah, whom the player maneuvers to smash through landscape obstacles and collect bonus points. After all lives are lost, players have the option of continuing gameplay with the insertion of an extra coin. As Space Harrier has no storyline, after the completion of all stages, only "The End" is displayed before the game returns to the title screen and attract mode, regardless of how many of the player's extra lives remain.
Development
The game was first conceived by a Sega designer named Ida, who wrote a 100-page document proposing the idea of a three-dimensional shooter that contained the word "Harrier" in the title. The game would feature a player-controlled fighter jet that shot missiles into realistic foregrounds, a concept that was soon rejected due to the extensive work required to project the aircraft realistically from varying angles as it moved around the screen, coupled with arcade machines' memory limitations. Sega developer Yu Suzuki therefore simplified the title character to a human, which required less memory and realism to depict onscreen. He then rewrote the entire original proposal, changing the style of the game to a science-fiction setting while keeping only the "Harrier" name. His inspirations for the game's new design were the 1984 film The Neverending Story, the 1982 anime series Space Cobra, and the work of artist Roger Dean. Certain enemies were modelled on characters from the anime series Gundam. Suzuki included a nod to the original designer in the finished product with an enemy character called Ida, a large moai-like floating stone head, because the designer "had a really big head". Three different arcade cabinets were produced: an upright cabinet, a sit-down version with a fixed seat, and its best known incarnation: a deluxe cockpit-style rolling cabinet that was mounted on a motorised base and moved depending on the direction in which players pushed the joystick. Sega was hesitant to have the cabinets built due to high construction costs; Suzuki, who had proposed the cabinet designs, offered his salary as compensation if the game failed, but it would instead become a major hit in arcades.Suzuki had little involvement with the game after its initial release: the Master System port was developed by Mutsuhiro Fujii and Yuji Naka, and they added a final boss and an ending sequence which were included in subsequent ports. The game was too successful for Sega to abandon the series, and other Sega staff, such as Naoto Ohshima, Kotaro Hayashida, and Toshihiro Nagoshi have had involvement in various sequels. In a 2015 interview, Suzuki said that he would have liked to create a new Space Harrier by himself, and was pleased to see it ported to the Nintendo 3DS.
Hardware
Space Harrier was one of the first arcade releases to use 16-bit graphics and scaled sprite technology that allowed pseudo-3D sprite scaling at high frame rates, with the ability to display 32,000 colors on screen. Running on the Sega Space Harrier arcade system board previously used in Suzuki's 1985 arcade debut Hang-On, pseudo-3D sprite/tile scaling is used for the stage backgrounds while the character graphics are sprite-based. Suzuki explained in 2010 that his designs "were always 3D from the beginning. All the calculations in the system were 3D, even from Hang-On. I calculated the position, scale, and zoom rate in 3D and converted it backwards to 2D. So I was always thinking in 3D".The game's soundtrack is by Hiroshi Kawaguchi, who composed drafts on a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and wrote out the final versions as sheet music, as he had no access to a "real" music sequencer at the time. A Zilog Z80 CPU powering both a Yamaha YM2203 synthesis chip and Sega's PCM unit that was used for audio and digitized voice samples. Space Harrier utilized an analog flight stick as its controller that allowed onscreen movement in all directions, while the velocity of the character's flight is unchangeable. The degree of push and acceleration varies depending on how far the stick is moved in a certain direction. Two separate "fire" buttons are mounted on the joystick and on the control panel; either one can be pressed repeatedly in order to shoot at enemies.
The deluxe arcade cabinet is a cockpit-style motion simulator cabinet that pitches and rolls during play, for which it is referred to as a taikan arcade game in Japan. It is often mistakenly referred to as a hydraulic cabinet, as a pair of motorized linear actuators in the base tilted the cabinet in two axes.
Ports
Space Harrier has been ported to numerous home computer systems and gaming consoles, with most early translations unable to reproduce the original's advanced visual or audio capabilities while the controls were switched from analog to digital. The first port was released in 1986 for the Master System, developed by Sega AM R&D 4. The first two-megabit cartridge produced for the console, the game was given a plot in which Harrier saves the "Land of the Dragons" from destruction, with a new ending sequence in contrast to the arcade version's simple "The End" message. All eighteen stages were present but the backdrops therein were omitted, leaving just a monochromatic horizon and the checkerboard floors. An exclusive final boss was included in a powerful twin-bodied fire dragon named Haya Oh, who was named after then-Sega president Hayao Nakayama. Hayo Oh has also been included as a boss in the Famicom, Game Gear, X68000 and Nintendo 3DS versions of the game. The 1991 Game Gear port is based on its Master System counterpart, but with redesigned enemies and only twelve stages, while Rutubo Games produced a near-duplicate of the arcade version in 1994 for the 32X add-on for the Sega Genesis. Both games featured box art by Marc Ericksen.Other releases were developed for non-Sega gaming systems such as the TurboGrafx-16 and the Famicom, while Europe and North America saw 8-bit home computer ports by Elite Systems for the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 in 1986, and later in 1989 for the 16-bit Amiga and Atari ST. The Commodore 64 received two conversions, one originating in the UK and the other from the USA.
M2, in collaboration with Sega CS3, ported Space Harrier to the handheld Nintendo 3DS console in 2013, complete with stereoscopic 3D and widescreen graphics—a process that took eighteen months. Sega CS3 producer Yosuke Okunari described the game's 3D-conversion process as "almost impossible. When you take a character sprite that was originally in 2D and bring it into a 3D viewpoint, you have to build the graphic from scratch". During development, M2 president Naoki Horii sought opinions from staff members regarding the gameplay of the arcade original: "They'd say it was hard to tell whether objects were right in front of their character or not. Once we had the game in 3D, the same people came back and said, 'OK, now I get it! I can play it now!'" The port included a feature that allowed players to use the 3DS's gyroscope to simulate the experience of the original motorised cabinet by way of a tilting screen, compounded by the optional activation of the sounds of button clicks and the cabinet's movement. Horii recalled in a 2015 interview that he was intrigued by the possibility of crafting Space Harrier and past Sega arcade games for the 3DS using stereoscopic technology: "Both SEGA and M2 wanted to see what would happen if we added a little bit of spice to these titles, in the form of modern gaming technology. Would it enhance the entertainment factor? I think the reception that the releases have had from critics highlights that these games are as relevant today as ever, and that means we've succeeded".