This Week In Retro: Space Harrier (Patreon)

December 1985: Welcome to the Fantasy Zone

by Diamond Feit

I've never thought too much about the meaning behind my dreams. Frankly, I'm not a fan of the practice and wish I could just wake up feeling refreshed; instead I stare up at the ceiling each morning and ask myself if everything I just experienced actually happened or not. I've lost count of the number of times I've come to panicking about a class I forgot to attend before recalling that I graduated from college many years ago so no professor on the planet can flunk me.

Every so often, however, my brain lets me enjoy my slumber by providing a brief taste of wish fulfillment. Maybe I'm playing a video game too realistic to exist or having a laugh with people long dead. Maybe I get to pretend I'm over six feet tall and look down on those who intimidate me in the real world. I'd still prefer to carry no memories at all of what my rapid-eye movements cook up but if I must indulge in these disorienting sensations, sweet dreams always beat nightmares.

The only scenarios that I enjoy and would love to activate on demand are those where I get to fly. Call it bird-envy or the result of growing up reading comic books, but I yearn to soar through the air without the need to board an airplane. I think my brain knows this and lets me indulge in a little mid-air shenanigans from time to time as a treat. On those rare occasions where I recognize my dreams as such, I inevitably test the waters of my subconscious by commanding my body to levitate. If I achieve lift off, then I get to zip through the clouds for a few fleeting moments before reality comes crashing down.

Video games have long catered to this specific urge to take flight without a vehicle, usually as a superhero or a winged animal. A few creativity-focused titles like Minecraft and Second Life throw in the ability as an ordinary means of transit, giving you the option to take in the sights or shape your environment from above.

40 years ago this month, a new arcade cabinet seduced players with the promise of high-speed action unbound by the laws of gravity. Originally intended to simulate flying a jet aircraft—as indicated by the game's title—Space Harrier instead cast off all earthly expectations for a far-out interplanetary adventure.

While the space shooter genre had already waxed, waned, and waxed again by the year 1985, most of those games starred a small vessel attacking waves of enemies as the screen scrolls horizontally or vertically. Only a few tried placing the camera behind the ship as it flew away from the screen towards a vanishing point in the distance as the difficulty involved in creating three-dimensional graphics proved too challenging. Atari's Tempest solved the problem by using vector graphics, although that game limits forward momentum to traveling between levels.

Space Harrier opens with a little guy running away from the player towards danger. The arcade version never offers a name for our hero, although later manuals for the home versions indicate he is the Space Harrier or possibly just called Harri. Whatever his identity, he carries a laser cannon almost as big as his own body as he rushes into action.

After an unseen narrator urges players to "GET READY" the protagonist leaves the ground and assumes his position in the center of the screen. Based on the red lights emitted from his cannon, I always assume his gun doubles as an engine that lets him fly. The arcade cabinet includes an analog flight stick that lets players steer the Space Harrier in any direction, but releasing the stick sends him back to the middle. None of this affects his rate of acceleration; his course forward remains constant regardless of input.

Space Harrier (the game) immediately throws Space Harrier (the man) into peril as alien creatures and mechanical monsters zoom into view. Between the arrival of opposing forces and their incoming fire, it doesn't take long before the screen becomes a blur of scaling sprites as you dodge and mash buttons to shoot back. Space Harrier only has one speed and you've got to get used to it in a hurry.

The game has a total of 18 levels—each one with a cryptic name like Moot or Drail—and while the perspective never changes, the color palette, local fauna, and hostiles all vary from stage to stage. Other shooters rely on all-black backgrounds or star fields to sell their space setting, but Space Harrier throws elongated dragons, cycloptic woolly mammoths, and gargantuan mushrooms into players faces to convince them that they're not in Kansas anymore.

And did I mention the colors? Tempest's vector graphics successfully unsettled me, but Space Harrier overwhelms the audience with 32,000 colors on screen. That's not a large number by modern standards but contemporary 8-bit consoles or computers could only dream of supporting a fraction of that figure.

Space Harrier debuted in Japan in late 1985 and wowed arcade exhibitors with its full-throttle intensity, especially the deluxe "rolling type" cabinet that pitches and tilts the player in sync with their joystick movement. According to designer Yu Suzuki in a 1986 interview* with Beep magazine, "The idea for Space Harrier really began with us wanting to create a game with a moving seat, or cockpit."

The earliest versions of the game all centered on a fighter jet or helicopter before Suzuki realized animating such a vehicle would demand too much memory. A humanoid figure, on the other hand, required far fewer sprites to depict in motion. This decision in turn informed the rest of the game. As Suzuki later explained*, "if the player is a flying human, then a normal/realistic world wouldn’t work. It would have to be fantastic."

Yu Suzuki and Sega managed to create that warplane game a couple years later as After Burner, but I consider Space Harrier superior precisely because it looks and sounds like nothing else. Thousands of video games depict conventional military operations, either based on real conflicts or imaginary ones. I've driven enough tanks and flown enough bombers in the digital world to last a lifetime. Space Harrier dazzles and overstimulates and never bothers to explain one second of what's on the screen. It's a pure vision of make-believe, the kind that major publishers avoid these days in favor of more recognizable pitches like "extraction shooter" or "battle royale."

Space Harrier never grew into a franchise like some of Sega's other arcade classics but it also never faded from the spotlight. Ports to a wide variety of consoles and computers—including those owned by Nintendo and NEC—put the game into player's homes around the world. When Sega launched their 16-bit Genesis/Mega-Drive system in the late 80s, Yu Suzuki had Space Harrier II ready to welcome players to the future on day one. In lieu of a third installment, Sega released a 3D spinoff called Planet Harriers in the year 2000 but slumping arcade sales greatly reduced its reach.

In the post-arcade era, Sega has continued to re-release the 1985 original on new platforms again and again. Today you can enjoy Space Harrier à la carte on the Nintendo Switch, as part of various retro game compilations, or inside the virtual arcades of Sega's Yakuza/Like a Dragon series. It's even included in the post-apocalyptic Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise, suggesting that people will still indulge in trips to the Fantasy Zone after the bombs fall.

I wish I had more opportunities to play Space Harrier when it was cutting edge; I remember seeing it on occasion but only the standard, stationary cabinet. Playing it today a full 40 years later, I can only imagine what it must have felt like to buckle up for a mission to the stars. Yet even without the seat-shaking Space Harrier holds up tremendously well in part due to its unique nature and its glorious soundtrack. My dreams of taking flight might remain unfulfilled, but Space Harrier is real, and strong, and he's my friend—for a few minutes at a time.

Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but xer work and opinions exist across the internet.

*all quotes in this column come from translations by Shmuplations.com