“Welcome to the Fantasy Zone. Get ready!” A sampled voice greeted every player of Space Harrier, and then the game ran at them. A blond hero with a cannon under his arm sprinted over a chequered plain that rushed towards the horizon, took off on his jet pack, and dodged stone columns, trees, giant heads and serpent-like dragons that grew from specks to screen-filling monsters in a second or two. In its deluxe cabinet the player sat in a seat that tipped and swung with the joystick. At the ATEI trade show in London in January 1986, Computer & Video Games reckoned it one of the two games that “steal the show”. A year later, Elite tried to squeeze it into a 48K Spectrum.
Fast facts
- Arcade release: December 1985 in Yu Suzuki’s own game history; Sega Retro records a limited Japanese release in October.
- Director: Yu Suzuki, whose Sega team was not yet called Sega AM2.
- Hardware: a relative of Suzuki’s Hang-On board, with two 68000 processors, scaling sprites and an analogue flight stick.
- Cabinets: an upright, a sit-down and a moving seat.
- Home computer versions: Elite Systems, 1986, for the Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64; Atari ST and Amiga later.
- Sega’s own versions: Master System (1986), Game Gear (1991), 32X (1994), and others licensed to NEC and Takara.
A Harrier without a Harrier
The name is left over from an earlier plan. According to Wireframe’s profile of Suzuki, the project began as a flying game with a helicopter, then a Harrier jump jet. Suzuki found the aircraft too hard to animate, replaced it with “a simple humanoid figure holding a laser cannon”, moved the game into a fantasy world and kept “Harrier” in the title. Sega Retro adds that the graphics would not fit in the memory available. The scenery owes a debt to the British artist Roger Dean, whose album covers Wireframe names as Suzuki’s inspiration.
Sega was nervous. Earlier 3D shooting games had not made money, and according to his programmer Satoshi Mifune, Suzuki offered to forgo his salary if Space Harrier failed. It did not fail. By February 1987, Sinclair User’s arcade columnist Clare Edgeley counted it among “last year’s chart hits”, with Paperboy and Gauntlet.
Riding it
The game is nothing but shooting and dodging. Computer & Video Games summed up the plot as “a dragon-buster whose sole purpose in life is to run and fly through as many object strewn screens as possible, defeating a fabulously colourful dragon at the end of each section”. Things on the ground had to be avoided, things in the air shot. The player’s forward speed was never theirs to control: the stick moved the hero around the screen, and the game carried him into it.
The cabinet was the attraction. Edgeley’s ATEI report described cockpits that “twist, turn, move up and down in the same direction you pull your joystick”, and the press called them hydraulic. Your Sinclair told readers to “look out for the machines that let you sit in front of them on a moving seat”; Elite had one on its stand at the PCW Show in 1986, so crowded that the reviewer “had to kick a few shins just to get close to it”. The machine also offered a continue, which Your Sinclair noticed: it “goes on giving out lives for as long as you keep feeding in cash”.
Inside the machine
Space Harrier belongs to the family of Sega boards that became known as “Super Scaler” hardware (see sprite scaling). Where the line begins is disputed: Suzuki himself told Edge in 1994 that Out Run was “the first game to use the Super Scaler technology”, while later accounts start with Hang-On. In the Edge interview’s game history, Space Harrier is “an impressive display of Sega’s sprite-scaling technology”.
MAME’s emulation of the board shows how close a relative of Hang-On it was. Two 68000 processors run at 10MHz. The sprite chip gives each sprite separate horizontal and vertical zoom factors, where Hang-On had one. The chequered ground comes from the Hang-On road chip, which MAME models as a single “Hang On/Space Harrier-style road chip”. A Z80 drives a Yamaha YM2203 for the music and Sega’s PCM sample chip for the speech, and the joystick is read through an analogue-to-digital converter, so the game knows how far it is pushed, not just which way. A switch on the board tells the game whether it is in an upright or a moving cabinet.
Your Sinclair told its readers the arcade machine had “1.2 megabyte graphic capacity” and “32,000 different colours”. The colour figure is close to the hardware: MAME stores each palette entry as five bits each of red, green and blue, a range of 32,768 colours, in a palette of 2,048 entries.
The music was by Hiroshi Kawaguchi with Suzuki, and the high-score table names the programmers Hideshi Kawatake and Satoshi Mifune, the artist Eiro Nagata and others, according to the credits compiled by Sega Retro.
Elite’s conversions
Elite Systems bought the home computer rights on Steve Wilcox’s trip to a Tokyo game show in September 1985, and set out to convert a machine that Your Sinclair compared to “cramming the complete history of the world into a twenty minute documentary”. The three 8-bit versions went on sale for Christmas 1986: £7.95 for the Spectrum, £8.95 for the Amstrad, and £9.95 on cassette or £14.95 on disk for the Commodore 64.
The Spectrum version was the work of Keith Burkhill, a 20-year-old from North Wales who had already written Elite’s Spectrum Ghosts ’n Goblins. He told Computer & Video Games he had seen the arcade game in Rhyl and “didn’t think I’d be able to do it at first”, then spent months on the scrolling. The chequered floor was drawn in full, but with no colour to spare the monsters were hard to read against it. The reviews split:
| Version | Magazine | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Spectrum | CRASH, Christmas 1986 | 77%: “The graphics on the arcade version were always what people talked about — but the Spectrum version has tried to make them too detailed, and the result looks very messy indeed” |
| Spectrum and Amstrad | Computer & Video Games, January 1987 | 10 out of 10 for playability on both: “It’s fast, it’s slick and it’s the most fun you’ll have with your Spectrum this year” |
| Amstrad | Amstrad Action, February 1987 | 90% and an AA Rave: “sheer, unadulterated blasting bliss”. The bad news: “both you and your joystick may be knackered” |
| Commodore 64 | ZZAP!64, February 1987 | 45%: “an uninspiring 3D shoot ’em up and a somewhat ‘incomplete’ conversion” |
The Amstrad version, Amstrad Action noted, drew its trees and aliens as outline “vector” graphics against solid backgrounds, which made them hard to pick out at first but kept the game fast. The Commodore 64 version was Chris Butler’s. Planning it in 1986, he told ZZAP!64 he would draw the objects with character graphics rather than sprites to save memory. ZZAP!’s reviewer found the result claustrophobic and jerky, and the hero’s running animation made it look “like he’s riding a unicycle”.
It sold anyway. The Spectrum version sat in the CRASH readers’ chart through much of 1987, and later went to Elite’s Encore budget label at £2.99. Elite’s own Atari ST and Amiga versions followed in 1988; ACE reported that May that the company was “particularly proud of ST Buggy Boy and Space Harrier”.
Sega’s versions
Sega’s own Master System cartridge was a bigger undertaking than its size suggests. Mutsuhiro Fujii, who managed Sega’s early home conversions, told Bitmap Books that when 2-megabit cartridges were made, “Space Harrier was chosen as the first project using that capacity”. He put an arcade cabinet next to Yuji Naka’s desk so that Naka could play it at any time, and the team added hidden bosses, characters and a story that the arcade game lacked. Like every home version of the time, it switched between ready-drawn sizes of each object instead of scaling them, and Sega Retro notes that it drew the enemies as background tiles so that they could not overlap. Tony Takoushi, then at Sega in London, remembered burning the first ROM chips by hand and taking the cartridge onto the television programme Network 7: “demand for the cart went through the roof”.
Other versions came from Sega and its licensees: Space Harrier 3-D for the Master System’s SegaScope glasses, a PC Engine version from NEC Avenue in 1988, a Famicom version published by Takara, and a Game Gear version in 1991. The Mega Drive opened in Japan in 1988 with a sequel, Space Harrier II.
The 32X version, released in December 1994 in Japan and January 1995 in Britain, came closest to the arcade. Previewing it, Ultimate Future Games wrote that “all that’s missing is the big wobbly booth and a whopping great joystick”. Edge was less excited about Sega’s first wave of 32X games, finding After Burner “dated these days. As does Space Harrier.”
Later history
The game has been reissued many times since: on the Saturn in 1996, in compilations for the PlayStation 2, Game Boy Advance and later consoles, as a playable machine inside Suzuki’s own Shenmue and Shenmue II, and in 3D on the Nintendo 3DS. In 2022 M2 wrote a Mega Drive version for the Mega Drive Mini 2, selectable from the Space Harrier II menu; Sega Retro notes that it runs at half the arcade’s frame rate. Suzuki’s After Burner (1987) turned Space Harrier’s simple homing shots into a lock-on missile system, and Sinclair User’s arcade columnist suspected in 1988 that the new game was “merely Space Harrier with planes”.
Sources
- Computer & Video Games issue 53, March 1986, pp. 82–83: Clare Edgeley’s ATEI report (the moving cockpits, the gameplay, the continue feature, the title screen).
- Computer & Video Games issue 63, January 1987, pp. 14–15: “Space Harrier: Welcome to the Fantasy Zone” (the arcade machine, Keith Burkhill’s background and quotes, prices, the Spectrum and Amstrad review and scores, Chris Butler’s C64 version).
- Your Sinclair issue 13, January 1987, pp. 24–25: Spectrum preview (the moving-seat cabinet at the PCW Show, “1.2 megabyte graphic capacity”, “32,000 different colours”, continues).
- CRASH issue 36, Christmas Special 1986, p. 28: Spectrum review (Elite, £7.95, Keith Burkhill, 77%). CRASH issues 38–44, March–September 1987: readers’ charts. CRASH issue 74, March 1990: the Encore reissue at £2.99.
- Amstrad Action issue 17, February 1987, pp. 64–65: Amstrad review (£8.95 cassette, £14.95 disk, vector graphics, 90%, AA Rave).
- ZZAP!64 issue 22, February 1987, pp. 108–109: Commodore 64 review (£9.95 cassette, £14.95 disk, 45%). Issue 17, September 1986, pp. 104–105: “The Butler Did It”, Chris Butler on his plans for the conversion.
- Sinclair User issue 59, February 1987, p. 92: Clare Edgeley’s coin-op column (“last year’s chart hits”). Issue 73, April 1988, p. 82: After Burner as “merely Space Harrier with planes”.
- ACE issue 8, May 1988: Elite’s ST Space Harrier. Issue 17, February 1989, Tony Takoushi, “Sega’s Sweet Sixteen”: the Mega Drive’s Japanese launch with Space Harrier 2.
- Computer & Video Games issue 83, September 1988, p. 98: Space Harrier “now available on the ST”.
- Edge issue 9, June 1994, pp. 45–50: “Yu Suzuki: Sega’s driving force” (the game history and Suzuki on the Super Scaler). Issue 16, January 1995: Sega’s first 32X games.
- Ultimate Future Games issue 2, January 1995, p. 22: 32X preview.
- Wireframe issue 43, September 2020, pp. 84–88: “Developer Profile: Yu Suzuki” (the helicopter and Harrier jet, Roger Dean, Mifune’s account of the salary offer, “Welcome to the fantasy zone. Get ready”).
- Steve Jarratt and Damien McFerran, SEGA Master System: a visual compendium (Bitmap Books, 2019), pp. 29–30 (interview with Mutsuhiro Fujii), p. 36 (Tony Takoushi), p. 59 (Space Harrier 3-D and the SegaScope glasses) and p. 90 (home versions could not scale sprites smoothly).
- MAME source code,
src/mame/sega/segahang.cpp,segaic16.cppandsegaic16_road.cpp(Aaron Giles and others): the Space Harrier board’s processors, sound chips, analogue stick, cabinet switch, palette and road chip. https://github.com/mamedev/mame - Sega Retro, “Space Harrier”, “Space Harrier/Production credits” and “Space Harrier (Elite Systems)” (web, secondary): release dates, the jet and memory, the arcade credits, the cabinets, the Master System’s tile-based enemies, later versions and the Mega Drive Mini 2 port. https://segaretro.org/Space_Harrier