Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection
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Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection
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Re: Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection
#2Thanks! I love all the Sega-era "billboard" style of games. There was actually a set of SegaScope 3D Glasses for use in the Sega Master System that could render a stereoscopic effect right on a NTSC-standard television set!
Re: Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection
#3Thanks! I love all the Sega-era "billboard" style of games. There was actually a set of SegaScope 3D Glasses for use in the Sega Master System that could render a stereoscopic effect right on a NTSC-standard television set! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shutter_3D_system
fyi for anyone who might be wanting to search for the "billboard" games, they are commonly referred to as Sega's "Super Scaler" games.
Re: Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection
#4For those interested, Lou's pseudo-3D page goes over some of the techniques used in this and similar games: http://www.extentofthejam.com/pseudo/
Re: Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection
#5I really only knew of Yu Suzuki because of Shenmue. I had no idea he was a hardware engineer as well, and led AM2.
Re: Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection
#6The Sega AM2 design team were the king of arcades back in their day. Always nice to see more stuff about these talented people.
Re: Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection
#7Thanks! I love all the Sega-era "billboard" style of games. There was actually a set of SegaScope 3D Glasses for use in the Sega Master System that could render a stereoscopic effect right on a NTSC-standard television set! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_shutter_3D_system
> There was actually a set of SegaScope 3D Glasses for use in the Sega Master System that could render a stereoscopic effect right on a NTSC-standard television set!
I had this! I'm too young to have played the Master System in its prime, but one day at my dad's office someone put a for sale ad on the bulletin board saying they had a bunch of old game systems and games. I bought the whole lot (a Genesis, NES, Master System, and a whole bunch of games/peripherals for each) for about $80. I was maybe 12 at the time, so a decent chunk of change I'd saved up.
Those goggles were one of the coolest and least practical things ever. The effect was kind of flickery.
Re: Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection
#8It's hard to convey how absolutely transformational it was for me to play Space Harrier in an arcade back in the day.
The graphics were mind-blowing. Big part of why I became a programmer, even though I went down a different path than game development.
Those big, bright, detailed sprites moving around with hardware-accelerated scaling at a smooth rock-solid 60fps!
There had been nothing like that before.
I mean, we'd sort of seen all this before. There had been wireframe vector 3D games like Battlezone. And even in 1986 it's not like we'd never seen psuedo-3D scaling effects before; even the arcade version of Pole Position from ca. 1982 had smoothly-scaled sprites.
But nothing had ever come remotely close to putting it together like Space Harrier. The entire screen was filled with a mindbending number of these huge scaling sprites, and the sprites themselves were as wild as the pseudo-3D motion: dragons, mushrooms, robots, and other bizarrities all rendered in a color palette that was much more nuanced than many games that had come before, predominantly rendered in that signature 1980s "Sega" look that used vibrant colors sparingly amongst predominantly pastel shades, a look that was beautiful and functional.
Love reading interviews like this, where the devs talk about how hardware limitations shaped their design decisions.
Re: Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection
#9"President Nakayama used to visit our office from time to time. The thing with Nakayama was, if he saw that the graphics were complete in your game, he would tell you it was done and it was time to release it. Nevertheless, we couldn’t just hide the game from him and show him nothing when he came by. So I rigged up a little switch underneath my desk…when I pressed that switch it would wipe the color RAM. You could wipe the color RAM, and it wouldn’t affect the rest of the game—everything would keep running, just the colors would get all glitched. To a layperson, it would look like the game wasn’t complete yet."
Yu Suzuki's boss button made him look less productive than he actually was.
Re: Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection
#10That is fascinating. I'd always wondered why Space Harrier's world was so goddamn weird and psychedelic, and reading that they consciously based it on Roger Dean makes so much sense. For reference:
https://www.nme.com/photos/the-far-out-prog-rock-album-art-o... https://gallery.rogerdean.com/