is a 1985 rail shooter video game developed and published by Sega for arcades. Designed by Yu Suzuki, the player navigates surreal landscapes while defeating enemies as a jet-propelled human character. It was conceived as a realistic military-themed combat flight simulation game, but technical and memory restrictions resulted in Suzuki redesigning it around a fantasy setting. The arcade game is controlled by an analog flight stick while the deluxe arcade cabinet is a cockpit-style linear actuator motion simulator cabinet that pitches and rolls during play, for which it is referred as a taikan (体感) or "body sensation" arcade game in Japan.
It was a commercial success in arcades, becoming one of Japan's top two highest-grossing upright/cockpit arcade games of 1986 (along with Sega's Hang-On). Critically praised for its innovative graphics, gameplay and motion cabinet, Space Harrier is often ranked among Suzuki's best works. It has made several crossover appearances in other Sega titles, and inspired a number of clones and imitators, while Capcom and PlatinumGames director Hideki Kamiya cited it as an inspiration for him entering the video game industry.
Space Harrier has been ported to over twenty different home computers and home video game consoles. Two home-system sequels followed in Space Harrier 3-D and Space Harrier II (both released in 1988), and the arcade spin-off Planet Harriers (2000). A polygon-based remake of the original game was released by Sega for the PlayStation 2 as part of their Sega Ages series in 2003.
Gameplay
left|thumb|Arcade gameplay
Space Harrier is a fast-paced rail shooter game played in a third-person perspective behind the protagonist, he is named "Harri" in several United Kingdom home releases of the game. while utilizing an underarm jet-propelled laser cannon that enables Harrier to simultaneously fly and shoot. The objective is simply to destroy all enemies—who range from prehistoric animals and Chinese dragons to flying robots, airborne geometric objects and alien pods—all while remaining in constant motion in order to dodge projectiles and immovable ground obstacles. Both spellings appear in the latter game: "Dark Uriah" serves as the final boss, but "Euria" is seen in the game's ending text.|group="note" whom the player maneuvers to smash through landscape obstacles and collect bonus points. After all lives are lost, players have the option of continuing gameplay with the insertion of an extra coin.
Development
The game was first conceived by a Sega designer named Ida, He then rewrote the entire original proposal, changing the style of the game to a science-fiction setting while keeping only the "Harrier" name. Suzuki included a nod to the original designer in the finished product with an enemy character called Ida, a large moai-like floating stone head, because the designer "had a really big head". incarnation: a deluxe cockpit-style rolling cabinet that was mounted on a motorised base and moved depending on the direction in which players pushed the joystick. Sega was hesitant to have the cabinets built due to high construction costs; Suzuki, who had proposed the cabinet designs, offered his salary as compensation if the game failed, but it would instead become a major hit in arcades.
Suzuki had little involvement with the game after its initial release: the Master System port was developed by Mutsuhiro Fujii and Yuji Naka, and they added a final boss and an ending sequence which were included in subsequent ports. The game was too successful for Sega to abandon the series, and other Sega staff, such as Naoto Ohshima (character designer for Sonic the Hedgehog), Kotaro Hayashida (planner of Alex Kidd in Miracle World), and Toshihiro Nagoshi (director of Super Monkey Ball) have had involvement in various sequels. In a 2015 interview, Suzuki said that he would have liked to create a new Space Harrier by himself, and was pleased to see it ported to the Nintendo 3DS. that allowed pseudo-3D sprite scaling at high frame rates, with the ability to display 32,000 colors on screen. previously used in Suzuki's 1985 arcade debut Hang-On, pseudo-3D sprite/tile scaling is used for the stage backgrounds while the character graphics are sprite-based.
The game's soundtrack is by Hiroshi Kawaguchi, who composed drafts on a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and wrote out the final versions as sheet music, as he had no access to a "real" music sequencer at the time. A Zilog Z80 CPU powering both a Yamaha YM2203 synthesis chip and Sega's PCM unit that was used for audio and digitized voice samples. Two separate "fire" buttons are mounted on the joystick (a trigger) and on the control panel; either one can be pressed repeatedly in order to shoot at enemies.
The deluxe arcade cabinet is a cockpit-style motion simulator cabinet that pitches and rolls during play, for which it is referred to as a taikan ("body sensation") arcade game in Japan. The first two-megabit cartridge produced for the console, Hayo Oh has also been included as a boss in the Famicom, Game Gear, X68000 and Nintendo 3DS versions of the game. The 1991 Game Gear port is based on its Master System counterpart, but with redesigned enemies and only twelve stages, Both games featured box art by Marc Ericksen.
Other releases were developed for non-Sega gaming systems such as the TurboGrafx-16 and the Famicom, while Europe and North America saw 8-bit home computer ports by Elite Systems for the ZX Spectrum,
M2, in collaboration with Sega CS3, ported Space Harrier to the handheld Nintendo 3DS console in 2013, complete with stereoscopic 3D and widescreen graphics—a process that took eighteen months. Sega CS3 producer Yosuke Okunari described the game's 3D-conversion process as "almost impossible. When you take a character sprite that was originally in 2D and bring it into a 3D viewpoint, you have to build the graphic from scratch". During development, M2 president Naoki Horii sought opinions from staff members regarding the gameplay of the arcade original: "They'd say it was hard to tell whether objects were right in front of their character or not. Once we had the game in 3D, the same people came back and said, 'OK, now I get it! I can play it now!'" compounded by the optional activation of the sounds of button clicks and the cabinet's movement.