Strider | Code Like It's 198x

Most heroes in 1989’s arcades ran and jumped. Strider Hiryu cartwheeled, slid along the floor under bullets, raced down slopes, and clamped himself to walls and ceilings to fight upside down. CRASH’s arcade reviewer watched him “do a triple backflip while slicing a robot in half with his laser sword” and decided it was “some of the most demanding gameplay ever invented – it’s exhausting just to watch!” The game was among the first to run on Capcom’s new CP System board, and its creator, Kouichi Yotsui, took its name from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Fast facts

Developer and publisher: Capcom; planned and directed by Kouichi Yotsui.
Hardware: the CP System, later called CPS-1; Strider followed Forgotten Worlds onto it.
Released: arcades, early 1989. The Games Machine reported that it had been called Falcon during development.
Setting: the year 2048, according to the British magazines; Hiryu’s target is the tyrant Grandmaster Meio.
Home computers: converted by Tiertex for U.S. Gold, autumn 1989, for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Amiga and PC.
Consoles: an NES game of the same name from Capcom (1989); Sega Mega Drive, made by Sega (Japan, September 1990); Master System, Sega (1991).
Sequels: U.S. Gold’s Strider II (1990); Capcom’s Strider 2 (arcade 1999, PlayStation 2000); Strider (2014).

Running across an empire

Yotsui wanted the game to feel like a journey. “I wanted a very broad worldview so that the game would feel like an adventure that was very much removed from everyday life,” he recalled, “with players progressing rapidly through very unfamiliar settings.” In five stages Hiryu hang-glides onto the rooftops of a Soviet city, crosses the Siberian snow with wolves at his heels, fights his way into Meio’s flying battleship, the Balrog, drops into an Amazon jungle full of warrior women and dinosaurs, and finally reaches Meio’s own base. The bosses were as strange as the places. In the first stage a chamber full of officials leap up and join together into Ouroboros, a huge mechanical caterpillar; later come Solo, a jet-packed bounty hunter, and a trio of martial artists guarding the way onto the Balrog.

Hiryu fights with a short-range plasma sword that sweeps in a wide arc in front of him. Containers dropped by passing drones hold power-ups that lengthen its reach, restore his energy or summon robot helpers: small saucer-shaped droids that follow him and fire when he strikes, a robot big cat (the “Robo-Panther” to the British magazine Raze) that bounds along beside him for a while, and a robot hawk.

The CP System made the rest possible. Fabien Sanglard’s history of the board notes that Strider had “impressive climbable sloped surfaces” and made prominent use of the board’s hardware starfield layer. Its graphics filled four megabytes of ROM.

In the arcades

The game made an immediate impression in Britain. In June 1989 The Games Machine reported that Strider was “sweeping the floors in the arcades”, having outsold all its competitors for three months. CRASH called it “one of the best platform and ladders games ever created (apart from maybe Ghouls’N’Ghosts)”, and thought it showed Capcom was “clearly on their way back to the top”.

Yotsui remembered it differently. “Strider was not the kind of game which sold a lot – it did not do well,” he said in a later interview. “I don’t remember what the actual sales were, but that was my impression. I remember Yoshiki Okamoto, the creator of Street Fighter II, coming up to me at Capcom and saying it was my fault the company was in the red.” He also remembered being given room to work by his superior, Tokuro Fujiwara, the creator of Ghosts ’n Goblins: “He could be very critical of the creations of his subordinates, but he made an exception for Strider in that he gave me a lot of freedom to do my own thing.” Sanglard records that Yotsui had joined Capcom in 1986 and left in 1990.

The U.S. Gold conversions

U.S. Gold held the home computer licence, and Tiertex, a Manchester company, did the work. The Games Machine reviewed the Amiga version in October 1989 and thought Hiryu moved as if “he’s made of rubber”. Zzap!64’s reviewers were won over: “Tiertex have achieved the impossible, converting the monster coin-op and making it the best platform game to date,” wrote one, and the Amiga version scored 96%. The Commodore 64 version fared much worse with the same magazine, at 42%. CRASH gave the Spectrum version 77% in the same month, and Sinclair User called it “a seriously blinding conversion of an ace arcade game”. Donald Campbell of Tiertex later said that it “was a success, receiving good reviews, and it sold well”. It was successful enough for Tiertex to persuade Capcom to let it write a sequel of its own, Strider II, which in Campbell’s words “didn’t perform very well”.

The Mega Drive version

Sega built its own version for the Mega Drive, released in Japan in September 1990 and in America late that year. It was a big cartridge for its day. Sega’s own magazine, Sega Visions, advertised it as the first eight-megabit game in the United States, four times the size of most earlier Sega games, and said a team of seven had spent close to a year on it. British reviewers were delighted. Mean Machines told arcade fans “there are absolutely no differences between the Megadrive version and the arcade original”, and Computer and Video Games’ 1990 console guide called it one of “those stunning pixel-perfect” conversions that showed what the machine could do. Sega also released a much simpler Strider for the Master System in 1991.

Capcom’s own NES Strider, released in America in 1989, was a different game: Electronic Gaming Monthly described it as “loosely based on the new coin-op”. Capcom itself ported the arcade game to Sharp’s X68000 computer in 1992.

Hiryu returns

After what Edge called “a flurry of activity in the late ’80s”, Hiryu went quiet until a cameo in Capcom’s Marvel vs. Capcom fighting game. In 1999 Capcom brought him back in Strider 2, an arcade game on a PlayStation-based board with 3D backgrounds behind the old side-on action. The PlayStation release in 2000 also included the original, which Edge thought, “even 11 years after its original arcade release, continues to impress”; it gave the package seven out of ten. In 2014 Capcom published a new Strider for PC and consoles, developed by the American studio Double Helix.

Sources

The Games Machine issue 16, March 1989, p. 69: arcade preview (“originally titled Falcon”; “new Capcom technology”).
CRASH issue 64, May 1989, p. 63: arcade review (the quotations).
The Games Machine issue 19, June 1989, p. 25: Strider outselling its arcade competitors for three months; computer versions due in September; Tiertex.
The Games Machine issue 23, October 1989, pp. 84–85: Amiga review (the year 2048, the five levels and the Balrog; “made of rubber”; prices).
Zzap!64 issue 54, October 1989, pp. 78–79: Amiga review (the quotation).
Zzap!64 issue 70, February 1991, p. 59: compilation review recalling the Commodore 64 (42%) and Amiga (96%) scores.
CRASH issue 69, October 1989, p. 46: Spectrum review, 77%.
Sinclair User issue 91, October 1989, pp. 34–35: Spectrum review (the quotation).
Mean Machines issue 2, November 1990, p. 18: Mega Drive review (the year 2048; five levels; “absolutely no differences”).
Computer and Video Games, Complete Guide to Consoles (1990), p. 36: Mega Drive review.
Sega Visions vol. 1 no. 2, October 1990, pp. 1 and 12–13: eight megabits, the team of seven and the December release; the stages.
Raze issue 8, June 1991, p. 25: Mega Drive feature (the Robo-Panther and the saucers; the Balrog; Meio).
Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 1, 1989, p. 27: the NES Strider, “loosely based on the new coin-op”.
Edge issue 75, September 1999: Strider 2 in the arcades on a PlayStation-based board; Hiryu’s cameo in Marvel vs. Capcom.
Edge issue 84, May 2000: PlayStation review of Strider 2 with the original, seven out of ten.
Edge issue 260, December 2013, p. 62: Strider (2014), Capcom and Double Helix.
Fabien Sanglard, The Book of CP-System (self-published; modern book), chapter 1 (Forgotten Worlds and Strider; sloped surfaces; ROM sizes), the starfield layers, the X68000 ports, and the staff biographies (Yotsui joined Capcom in 1986 and left in 1990).
Kouichi Yotsui, interview in SEGA Master System: A Visual Compendium (Bitmap Books, 2019), p. 168: the name from Tolkien, Grandmaster Meio, sales, Okamoto and Fujiwara; the Master System version by Sega, 1991.
Chris Wilkins and Roger M. Kean, The Story of U.S. Gold (Fusion Retro Books, 2015), p. 133: Donald Campbell on Strider and Strider II.
Retro Gamer Collection vol. 5 (2011), “The Making Of: Strider”: the bosses; the NES game, 1989.
Strider, Sega Retro (web, secondary): Mega Drive release dates (Japan 29 September 1990, America November 1990), the list of home versions, the plasma sword and the robot hawk. https://segaretro.org/Strider