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Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection

ArtWomb 8y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shutter_3D_system
- glhaynes 8y ago
  fyi for anyone who might be wanting to search for the "billboard" games, they are commonly referred to as Sega's "Super Scaler" games.
- cnasc 8y ago
  > 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.
  - wvenable 8y ago
    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.
mysterydip 8y ago
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/ http://www.extentofthejam.com/pseudo/
- lostgame 8y ago
  Oh, wow, this was a fantastic read, thank you!
  - Pulcinella 8y ago
    See also this video https://youtu.be/K7gWmdgXPgk 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.
    - lostgame 8y ago
      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.
favorited 8y ago
I really only knew of Yu Suzuki because of Shenmue. I had no idea he was a hardware engineer as well, and led AM2.
- b_tterc_p 8y ago
  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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
joezydeco 8y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_AM2
JohnBooty 8y ago
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.
- sundvor 8y ago
  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 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 https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9660
- wiz21c 8y ago
  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 !
bangonkeyboard 8y ago
"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.
- will_pseudonym 8y ago
  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."
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
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-of-roger-dean-1415654 https://www.nme.com/photos/the-far-out-prog-rock-album-art-o... https://gallery.rogerdean.com/ https://gallery.rogerdean.com/
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  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.
wavefunction 8y ago
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.
lubujackson 8y ago
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.
_Codemonkeyism 8y ago
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.
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  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.
vertline3 8y ago
Yu Suzuki's Virtua Fighter is in the Smithsonian.
benj111 8y ago
"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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bsaul 8y ago
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 !
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

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

glhaynes 8y ago
fyi for anyone who might be wanting to search for the "billboard" games, they are commonly referred to as Sega's "Super Scaler" games.
cnasc 8y ago
> 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.
- wvenable 8y ago
  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.

mysterydip 8y ago

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/ http://www.extentofthejam.com/pseudo/

lostgame 8y ago
Oh, wow, this was a fantastic read, thank you!
- Pulcinella 8y ago
  See also this video https://youtu.be/K7gWmdgXPgk 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.
  - lostgame 8y ago
    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.

favorited 8y ago

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

b_tterc_p 8y ago
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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

joezydeco 8y ago

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

JohnBooty 8y ago

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.

sundvor 8y ago
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 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 https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=9660
wiz21c 8y ago
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 !

bangonkeyboard 8y ago

"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.

will_pseudonym 8y ago
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."

PhasmaFelis 8y ago

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-of-roger-dean-1415654 https://www.nme.com/photos/the-far-out-prog-rock-album-art-o... https://gallery.rogerdean.com/ https://gallery.rogerdean.com/

JohnBooty 8y ago
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.

wavefunction 8y ago

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.

lubujackson 8y ago

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.

_Codemonkeyism 8y ago

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.

JohnBooty 8y ago
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.

vertline3 8y ago

Yu Suzuki's Virtua Fighter is in the Smithsonian.

benj111 8y ago

"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.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bsaul 8y ago

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 !

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]