In the mid-1980s a space shooter usually looked like space: black, starry and hostile. Fantasy Zone looked like a sweet shop. Its hero, Opa-Opa, was a little winged ship with feet, and it flew over pastel hills, giant flowers and floating islands, shooting things that looked like toys. The colours were a deliberate bet. Its designer, Yoji Ishii, recalled that Sega needed a shooter that could stand up to Xevious, TwinBee and Gradius, “and that’s why we went with a completely new graphics style, with pastel colours.”
The other bet was the shop. Instead of collecting power-ups, Opa-Opa collected money, and spent it.
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Sega. Yoji Ishii planned and directed it.
- Arcade release: 1986, on Sega’s System 16 board.
- Home versions: Sega’s own for the Master System (1986), and licensed versions for the MSX, the Famicom (by Sunsoft), the NES (by Tengen), the PC Engine and the Sharp X68000.
- Sequels: Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa (1987), Fantasy Zone: The Maze (1987) and Super Fantasy Zone (1992), among others.
Starting from scratch
Ishii counted Flicky and Hang-On among his earlier Sega games. In his telling, Sega had a team that had spent a year on space shooting games without finding one that worked, “so the head of the development division came to me and asked me to start from scratch basically, and make a space shooting game.”
He did not like the way other shooters handled upgrades. “We had these shooting games where you’re just flying and you hit a power-up, and then it sort of sticks to your ship? That’s strange, right? It doesn’t make any sense.” He wanted something more like a parts shop: “So you would gather money, and then go and buy new equipment.” Ishii claimed the idea as his own: “The ‘shopping system’ was original and then other shooters copied it.”
Sega Retro credits the arcade programming to Shuichi Katagi and two colleagues, the graphics to Masaki Kondoh and the music to Hiroshi Kawaguchi, the composer who later scored After Burner.
Flying and shopping
The game borrows its shape from Defender. The playfield scrolls left or right and wraps round, so flying far enough in one direction brings Opa-Opa back to where it started. In each round the job is to destroy the enemy bases dotted around the landscape; when the last one falls, a large boss appears and the scrolling stops. Computer and Video Games counted eight planets to clear. Opa-Opa has two weapons: a forward gun and bombs that drop on to targets below.
Destroyed enemies drop coins, and shops arrive as balloons that float across the screen. Fly into one and the game pauses for a spending spree. C+VG’s Tony Takoushi listed the Master System version’s stock in May 1988: faster engines (“Big Wings, Jet, Turbo, Rocket”), new guns (“Laser, 7-way shot, Wide Beam”) and bombs (“Twin, Smart, Fire and Heavy”). Sega Retro, describing the arcade game, points out the catch: once Opa-Opa has bought faster engines, the bases start firing back.
The cheerful look hid a hard game. Sega Retro describes the last rounds filling with so many bullets that they are hard to survive even when the arcade operator has set the machine to easy.
On the Master System
Sega’s home version came out in Japan the same year, for the console then called the Mark III, and it was the work of Mutsuhiro Fujii. Fujii described the job as finding out how much he could fit into the console’s first one-megabit cartridge. Things had to go. “We had to eliminate vertical scrolling so that it would scroll only horizontally,” he said, and some bosses changed “because the sprites were overlapping.” Backgrounds, enemies and bases were simplified to fit. Sega’s own manual for the console warns that no more than eight sprites can share a line of the display, and Fujii remembered nudging Opa-Opa “slightly up and down so that it wouldn’t overlap or flicker when a bullet flew by.” He also added things the arcade game lacked, so that “both beginners and experienced players could enjoy the game”, and recalled that it was well received when Sega showed it at the Consumer Electronics Show in America.
It made an impression inside Sega too. Takashi Shoji, who joined the company in 1987, said the first game he saw running on the console was Fantasy Zone: “The world in pastel colour was clearly different from that of the Famicom games.” In America Family Computing picked it out in July 1987 as “a cartoony scrolling shoot-’em-up with bright colors and infectious music”.
British readers heard about it before they could buy it. In December 1986 Your Computer reported that Ariolasoft would launch the Master System with eight games at £19.95, Fantasy Zone among them, and found it “almost identical to the arcade original”. The console in fact reached British shops in 1987 through Mastertronic, which sold Fantasy Zone on a Mega Cartridge at £19.95. When Takoushi reviewed it, he remembered the arcade machine standing in the Crystal Rooms in Leicester Square, where “it seemed to die a death. It is strange because it is a beaut of a game.”
Other machines
The licensed versions differed a good deal. Sega Retro records that Pony made the MSX version, NEC Avenue the PC Engine version and Dempa Micomsoft the X68000 version. Sunsoft converted it for the Famicom in 1987, and Tengen, which sold it in North America, had its own NES version made separately. Retro Gamer counts Fantasy Zone among the Sega coin-ops that NEC’s in-house studio reprogrammed for the PC Engine.
Opa-Opa’s later career
Sega briefly made Opa-Opa a mascot. Retro Gamer has described the ship as Sega’s first mascot, replaced soon afterwards by Alex Kidd.
The sequels came mostly on the Master System. Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa (1987) was an entirely new game for the console, later released in arcades on Sega’s System E board. Fantasy Zone: The Maze (1987) crossed the series with Pac-Man: Opa-Opa collects coins in a maze and spends them in the shop. A Japan-only spin-off, Galactic Protector, used Sega’s paddle controller. On the Mega Drive, Super Fantasy Zone (1992) was made by Sunsoft under licence from Sega.
The series later found a champion in M2, a Japanese studio that specialises in conversions of old games. For the PlayStation 2 Fantasy Zone Complete Collection (2008), M2’s head, Naoki Horii, wanted to know what Fantasy Zone II would have looked like as a System 16 arcade game, so his team rebuilt it on the original System 16 arcade hardware. Wireframe reported that Horii paid for the work himself, at a cost he once put at “about the price of a new car”. The original game has been re-released many times since, including a stereoscopic 3D version for the Nintendo 3DS in 2014.
How cute was new?
Sega Retro notes that Fantasy Zone is often called the first “cute ’em up”, a shooter with bright colours and toy-like enemies. The label needs care. Ishii remembered Konami’s TwinBee, with its bells and cartoon ships, as already out, and named it among the games he had to compete with. What Fantasy Zone added was the pastel landscape and the shop.
Sources
- Steve Jarratt and Damien McFerran, SEGA Master System: a visual compendium (Bitmap Books, 2019): p. 25, Yoji Ishii on designing Fantasy Zone (Sega’s search for a shooter, Xevious, TwinBee and Gradius, the pastel colours and the shopping system); pp. 29–30, interview with Mutsuhiro Fujii (the one-megabit cartridge, the cuts, the flicker, the CES showing); p. 47, Fantasy Zone II; p. 85, Fantasy Zone: The Maze; p. 90, the Master System sequels (including Fantasy Zone II’s arcade release) and Galactic Protector; p. 142, interview with Takashi Shoji.
- Sega, Software Reference Manual for the Sega Mark III (1986), p. 8: “Up to eight sprites can occupy a single horizontal raster line.”
- Your Computer, December 1986, p. 19: Ariolasoft’s Master System launch line-up and the “almost identical” conversion.
- Family Computing, July 1987, p. 20: the Sega Master System, and Fantasy Zone’s “bright colors and infectious music”.
- CRASH issue 44, September 1987, p. 78: Mastertronic’s distribution of the Master System; Fantasy Zone on Mega Cartridge; prices.
- Computer and Video Games issue 73, November 1987: Sega’s British release schedule (Fantasy Zone, £19.95, August).
- Computer and Video Games issue 79, May 1988, pp. 122–123: Tony Takoushi’s Sega reviews (Fantasy Zone: the Crystal Rooms, eight planets, the shop’s stock).
- Retro Gamer issue 40, 2007, p. 44: NEC Avenue’s PC Engine conversions of Sega coin-ops, Fantasy Zone among them.
- Retro Gamer issue 44, 2007, p. 49: Opa-Opa as Sega’s first mascot, before Alex Kidd. The same publisher’s 100 Retro Games to Play Before You Die, in its Sonic the Hedgehog entry, calls Opa-Opa “often referred to as the very first mascot”.
- Wireframe issue 31, January 2020, pp. 50–53, “The quiet brilliance of M2”: Fantasy Zone Complete Collection and the System 16 version of Fantasy Zone II.
- Sega Retro, “Fantasy Zone”, “Fantasy Zone/Production credits”, “Fantasy Zone/Development”, “Super Fantasy Zone” and “Yoji Ishii” (web, secondary): release dates, arcade credits, Fantasy Zone II’s System E release, the gameplay description, the home conversions and their developers, Super Fantasy Zone and 3D Fantasy Zone. https://segaretro.org/Fantasy_Zone