
Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection - VoidSetAndMatch
http://shmuplations.com/spaceharrier/
======
JohnBooty
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.

~~~
wiz21c
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 !

~~~
JohnBooty
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...](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)

------
bangonkeyboard
"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
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
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://www.nme.com/photos/the-far-out-prog-rock-album-art-of-roger-
dean-1415654) [https://gallery.rogerdean.com/](https://gallery.rogerdean.com/)

~~~
JohnBooty
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.

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

~~~
Pulcinella
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
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.

------
benj111
"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.

------
joezydeco
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)

------
ArtWomb
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)

~~~
cnasc
> 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
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.

------
favorited
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
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.

------
_Codemonkeyism
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
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.

------
wavefunction
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
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.

------
bsaul
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 !

------
vertline3
Yu Suzuki's Virtua Fighter is in the Smithsonian.

