It's hard to convey how absolutely transformational it was for me to play Space Harrier in an arcade back in the day.

The graphics were mind-blowing. Big part of why I became a programmer, even though I went down a different path than game development.

Those big, bright, detailed sprites moving around with hardware-accelerated scaling at a smooth rock-solid 60fps!

There had been nothing like that before.

I mean, we'd sort of seen all this before. There had been wireframe vector 3D games like Battlezone. And even in 1986 it's not like we'd never seen psuedo-3D scaling effects before; even the arcade version of Pole Position from ca. 1982 had smoothly-scaled sprites.

But nothing had ever come remotely close to putting it together like Space Harrier. The entire screen was filled with a mindbending number of these huge scaling sprites, and the sprites themselves were as wild as the pseudo-3D motion: dragons, mushrooms, robots, and other bizarrities all rendered in a color palette that was much more nuanced than many games that had come before, predominantly rendered in that signature 1980s "Sega" look that used vibrant colors sparingly amongst predominantly pastel shades, a look that was beautiful and functional.

Love reading interviews like this, where the devs talk about how hardware limitations shaped their design decisions.

Makes me realize how MAME is insufficient to reproduce the incredible gameplay of Space Harrier (I don't say this as a critic of Mame but more to express that there was somethign really special about Space Harrier). The moving cabinet was so smooth and the joystick reacted so well to the manoeuver (especially when you had to do that "triangle" to avoid the mech at the higher levels).

Anybody remember the Asute level with blinking obstacles ? Mindblowing gameplay !

Welcome to the fantasy zone !

Yeah MAME is great (and I've actually played through Space Harrier on MAME, it's only like 15 minutes long ha ha ha) but there's nothing like playing on real hardware on a CRT for a true zero lag experience.

Playing a game on a modern platform (including MAME running on a PC) adds about 100ms of latency, minimum. That's not a ton of latency, and games can still be plenty fun, but it's on the threshold of being noticeable and even if we're not conscious of that input lag, it's just not the game as that "I'm wired directly into the machine" feeling of a true zero latency setup.

http://renderingpipeline.com/2013/09/measuring-input-latency...

(of course, even in an all-analog setup, there can be latency, but not on the order of 100ms. at least not on the hardware side of things)

Yeah, I must admit I had forgotten about the game - but I do recall how it had me mesmerised back in the days. I must have been about 12 when it came out.

Here's a video recording to really jog those memories; make sure to watch at 60fps! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLOf2StF_zY

However you really need to look at the cabinet design too, which was really cool: https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9660

This makes me realize how amazing it is that the C64 port of Space Harrier was fully playable and actually pretty good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgMHuYjIlpY

That's... wow. That's... impressive.

I'm kind of laughing because it's simultaneously like...

(a) impressive that they even pulled this off

(b) you might almost have to know what the original Space Harrier is "supposed" to look like in order to recognize what the heck is going on there

My expectations for "what the heck is going on in this game" were probably a lot lower at age 10, but I played the C64 port before I ever saw a Space Harrier cabinet, and I think it read about as well as the original, which is to say not very. :) There's rocks in the sky and giant mushrooms on the ground and one-eyed mammoths and Zardoz heads are shooting lasers at you. I don't think "the player should have any clue what is happening ever" was in the design doc!

The fascinating thing is that the C64 port was actually fun. It's decently fast, all the core gameplay is there, and it's got way more stuff moving and happening at once than you normally ever saw on the C64, or any 8-bit system really. There were quite a lot of crappy 64 ports of much less technically impressive games (Karnov and Ikari Warriors come to mind), so the fact that they (or him, I think this was a one-man effort like most C64 games) managed to make it work is kinda mind-blowing.

And I just learned that this was the somewhat-rushed UK release--the programmer apparently tweaked it a lot for the US release, adding striped ground textures, better projectiles, much better running animations, and improved sound effects, among other things. Wow.

"President Nakayama used to visit our office from time to time. The thing with Nakayama was, if he saw that the graphics were complete in your game, he would tell you it was done and it was time to release it. Nevertheless, we couldn’t just hide the game from him and show him nothing when he came by. So I rigged up a little switch underneath my desk…when I pressed that switch it would wipe the color RAM. You could wipe the color RAM, and it wouldn’t affect the rest of the game—everything would keep running, just the colors would get all glitched. To a layperson, it would look like the game wasn’t complete yet."

Yu Suzuki's boss button made him look less productive than he actually was.

It also ended up leading to the color of the sky used in the game.

"When I pressed that switch it would wipe the color RAM. You could wipe the color RAM, and it wouldn’t affect the rest of the game—everything would keep running, just the colors would get all glitched. To a layperson, it would look like the game wasn’t complete yet. Well, one time we did this, and randomly, the colors of the sky looked extremely striking. Then I used our development tool ICE to stop the CPU and extract the color RAM data, and those became the colors we used for Space Harrier."

That is fascinating. I'd always wondered why Space Harrier's world was so goddamn weird and psychedelic, and reading that they consciously based it on Roger Dean makes so much sense. For reference:

https://www.nme.com/photos/the-far-out-prog-rock-album-art-o... https://gallery.rogerdean.com/

Same here. I've boggled over this game forever, and I hadn't known they directly drew inspiration from Roger Dean.

I also always suspected that the furry dragon from the bonus stages was inspired by the luck dragon Neverending Story, but I'd never seen it directly confirmed until now. Neat.

For those interested, Lou's pseudo-3D page goes over some of the techniques used in this and similar games: http://www.extentofthejam.com/pseudo/

Oh, wow, this was a fantastic read, thank you!

See also this video https://youtu.be/K7gWmdgXPgk to see how the snes mode 7 (though really you also need HDMA) perspective transformation worked.

The whole series of videos is amazing.

I really appreciate the simple explanation of how raster effects worked in your original article.

It's something I always feel like I understood, but couldn't necessarily explain to someone else if I had to.

"Originally, the “Harrier” in the title was going to be a French VTOL-capable fighter jet"

I did wonder why it was called space Harrier.

But it isn't French, its British. Although I suppose enough Chinese and Japanese things have been confused by westerners, so I'll let them off.

The Sega AM2 design team were the king of arcades back in their day. Always nice to see more stuff about these talented people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_AM2

Thanks! I love all the Sega-era "billboard" style of games. There was actually a set of SegaScope 3D Glasses for use in the Sega Master System that could render a stereoscopic effect right on a NTSC-standard television set!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shutter_3D_system

> There was actually a set of SegaScope 3D Glasses for use in the Sega Master System that could render a stereoscopic effect right on a NTSC-standard television set!

I had this! I'm too young to have played the Master System in its prime, but one day at my dad's office someone put a for sale ad on the bulletin board saying they had a bunch of old game systems and games. I bought the whole lot (a Genesis, NES, Master System, and a whole bunch of games/peripherals for each) for about $80. I was maybe 12 at the time, so a decent chunk of change I'd saved up.

Those goggles were one of the coolest and least practical things ever. The effect was kind of flickery.

I played a store demo of those Sega shutter glasses as a kid, exactly once. It didn't leave a super positive impression but I still remember it.

fyi for anyone who might be wanting to search for the "billboard" games, they are commonly referred to as Sega's "Super Scaler" games.

I really only knew of Yu Suzuki because of Shenmue. I had no idea he was a hardware engineer as well, and led AM2.

I only knew of Space Harrier because it was in Shenmue at the local arcade. I didn’t know it was a real arcade game. But I probably burned through an equivalent amount of virtual quarters on it in game.

I was amazed when I it came out and was so fast, I've spent a lot of money on Space Harrier as a kid and the color checkered bottom inspired some effects in the demos I've written back then.

Out Run though brought even more 3d feeling with the up and down.

Man, those were good memories.

Interestingly enough I had the opposite experience with Out Run and Space Harrier!

Out Run definitely brought a lot of cool new graphics and sound, including those hills, but it felt to me like "just another racing game" like the ones we'd been playing since Turbo and Pole Position.

For me Space Harrier felt like it was a big leap in freedom over those old driving games where you were glued to the ground. Why would I want to drive when I could fly?

Well, it's this kind of difference that makes these games so worthy of discussion. They meant things to us, and they can mean different things to different people. I'm glad that the world has begun to appreciate these games as art.

My jam at the arcade in Manitou, CO.

This interview seems uniquely Japanese while still reading incredibly charming and interesting. Some meta-design along with the nuts and bolts of what this small team accomplished.

Still waiting for a VR version of Space Harrier. I miss that feeling from the old arcade capsule cabinet when the ceiling dropped over you mirroring the checkerboard floor.

two things i wonder :

- how would space harrier look with today’s technology..

- how come nobody ever tried to replicate this tech ! We’re working on laser saber, railgun ,hoverboards, but man this gun / reactor combo !

Yu Suzuki's Virtua Fighter is in the Smithsonian.