Those two words launch eager gamers into the Fantasy Zone, a day-glo universe inhabited by dragons, giant robots, and Easter Island heads. The mission? Players zoom through wave after wave of these colorful nasties while clutching a cannon capable of bringing down even the biggest one-eyed woolly mammoths. The hero of this world is so powerful, he can even fly through the air just by lifting his feet off the ground and willing it to be. If that sounds like a crazy premise to you, then SEGA's Yu Suzuki, head of its famous AM2 division, did his job well. 百度 如此一来，在全国人大常委会之前的《授权决定》将于2月28日到期之际，证监会主席刘士余建议股票发行注册制授权决定期限延长两年至2020年2月29日，这显然是一个实事求是的、符合中国股市现状的选择。
Space Harrier, released into arcades in 1985, was a colorful revelation compared to many of the other top hits of the previous year. Arcade games were beginning to introduce narratives and atmospheres much more complex than those that accompanied twitch games. 1985 also hosted Capcom's Ghosts 'n Goblins and Nintendo's Super Mario Bros., both designed to keep the player hooked by seeing what would happen next instead of just offering a basic high score pursuit.
SEGA's Space Harrier offers plenty of "next" to keep gamers glued to the cabinet, feeding it a constant stream of quarters. Space Harrier is an 18-stage game that lasts about 40-minutes if gamers dedicated a pocketful of change to seeing every wild enemy and colorful checkerboard world. The skies fill with bulbous Loopers and strafing Mukadense jet fighters. The ground is lined with giant mushrooms and tall towers. Boss monsters are huge, screen-filling creatures like the skeletal dragon Valda, twin-headed serpent Godarni, and the skull-faced mass of tentacles, Barbarian. Even today, Space Harrier is a sight to behold, a hellzapoppin' explosion of light, color, and imagination.
But for a game that was so popular in arcades and made subsequent splashes on a variety of home consoles, Space Harrier doesn't exactly have much of a family tree. SEGA never exploited the series. The only proper sequel to Space Harrier, Space Harrier II, accompanied the Genesis for its 1989 launch. A side-story of sorts debuted on the Master System. It wasn't until 2000, 15 years after its debut, that Space Harrier returned to the arcades in the form of Planet Harriers, a sorta-sequel that maintained only the general mechanics of the original.
The Man Behind the Dragons
Space Harrier remains one of Suzuki's great achievements on a résumé that includes such mega-hits as Virtua Fighter and Out Run. Released alongside Suzuki's Hang-On, Space Harrier earned glowing praise and swallowed enough quarters and yen to buttress Suzuki's position as not only one of SEGA's rising stars, but also one of the best directors in the entire industry. SEGA already had a powerhouse reputation thanks to past hits like Pengo and Zaxxon, but Suzuki's contributions are largely responsible for buoying the company as a whole.
Yu Suzuki After Space Harrier, Suzuki and the AM2 team created popular hits like Power Drift and After Burner II before fully launching the polygon revolution with the release of Virtua Racing in 1992. Suzuki was on the forefront of 3D with 1993's Virtua Fighter, which was both a monster hit and an industry turning point.
Suzuki's standing within SEGA has changed since the arcade scene faded and the gaming giant abdicated the home console wars following the Dreamcast. Suzuki's Shenmue, one of the most expensive games ever created with a budget estimated at $70 million, was a costly disappointment for SEGA that was unable to halt SEGA's declining position in the hardware market despite selling a healthy 1.2 million copies around the world. Recently, rumors surrounded whether or not Suzuki was even employed by SEGA at this point -- but reports of Suzuki's departure were dismissed by SEGA of America president Simon Jeffery, the same person who fostered the rumor by being unsure of Suzuki's position in a Gamasutra interview.
But even if Suzuki's star has dimmed a bit in recent years, the potency of his legacy (thus far) cannot be questioned. Suzuki and his AM2 team jolted arcades and provided SEGA with a steady stream of hits to prop up its home consoles. And Space Harrier is just one of those games, which appeared on virtually every machine in the late eighties, from the Master System to the Amiga.
Harrier Comes Home
The year after Space Harrier wowed 'em in the arcades, SEGA started an aggressive campaign to port the game to a number of home machines. None of the consoles and personal computers at the time had the hardware to produce a pixel-perfect representation of the arcade game. After all, the arcade cabinet was powered by SEGA's MC68000 board and could splash no fewer than 32,000 colors on-screen. Contrast that with the Master System, which was capable of only 32 simultaneous colors and could not replicate SEGA scaling techniques that made games like Space Harrier and Out Run perform so smoothly.
The arcade version of Space Harrier was also controlled via a flight stick that was analog instead of digital. The joystick registered the degree of push so you could either slam the hero all the way across the screen to escape injury or just nudge him a hair. Every single platform SEGA ported the game to had only digital directional pads and joysticks, making it impossible to reproduce the arcade's pinpoint controls.
Editions of Space Harrier appeared on the Commodore 64, Atari ST, and other home computers of the mid-eighties. The best of the early ports, though, was on the Master System. SEGA's 8-bit console was ill-equipped to handle a fast-paced, scaling game like Space Harrier, but through the miracle of smart coding, the port ended up being entirely playable. It's quite accurate to the arcade game, including the bosses (although slightly scaled back) and the bonus stages where you ride on the back of a furry white dragon that looks like Falkor from Neverending Story.
As expected, the colors are also muted. The Master System has serious limitations and sprite sizes and numbers, too, so monsters appear smaller and most of them have "blocks" around them. When the monsters fly below the horizon line, for example, the edges of the sprites are surrounded by bricks the same color as the sky for that stage. But these shortcomings are countered with an extra final boss and a completion screen that gives you a little more closure than "the end" and the request for three initials.
Space Harrier actually made two appearances on the Master System. In 1988, SEGA followed the arcade port up with Space Harrier 3D. This is actually a completely new game instead of a remake, complete with new enemies and stages. The game employi the unfortunately under-utilized 3D Glasses to create a sense of depth in the Fantasy Zone. Monsters aren't flying off the screen at you, but it does appear as if you were looking "into" the game from the outside. The effect is cool, but did it ever come at a price. If you thought the Master System port of the arcade game was clunky, Space Harrier 3D is even worse. The animations are severely limited and movement around the screen is hardly smooth. The hero seems to stutter as he flies and his shots into the screen are poorly scaled.
Still, it is one of the better 3D games for the glasses peripheral, which is something of a collector's item now. If you do not have the 3D Glasses, you can play the game in normal mode by managing your way through the adventure once and then inputing a special code. (The logic behind this is admittedly suspect.) Space Harrier 3D is certainly superior to the Game Gear port of the game, which is features even choppier animations and plenty of pixel messes on-screen that detract from the overall game.
The Lone Sequel
When the Genesis debuted in America in 1989, it was accompanied by the pack-in cartridge Altered Beast. The inclusion of Altered Beast and marketing materials that showed off screens from Super Thunder Blade and After Burner II was SEGA's indication to hardcore arcade gamers that if you liked SEGA's quarter-munchers, the Genesis was the console for you in the 16-bit era. Instead of just shunting out a Space Harrier arcade port, though, SEGA commissioned a full-fledged sequel from AM2. It launched alongside the Genesis that holiday season and enjoyed solid sales.
Space Harrier II plays almost exactly like the original. You are still blasting into the Fantasy Zone (called Fantasyland in the American edition) with a huge cannon tucked under your arm. The number of stages is reduced to 12, but players can actually choose the order in which they play through them. Since there are no power-ups at all, there is no benefit to picking one stage over another early in the game. The game has bonus stages, but instead of flying on the back of the white dragon, you stand abroad an indestructible hoverboard.
Like the original, you zoom through wave after wave of crazy enemies, like giant robots, rock heads, animated armor, and flashing jellyfish. You must fend off attacks from phalanxes of Dark Harriers, shadowy mirrors of the hero. And each stage ends with a boss fight against a giant monster, such as a three-headed turtle (Gamera?) and a hooded sorcerer inside a ring of orbs.
Space Harrier II is a fast-moving game that proved the Genesis could handle speed, large sprites, and lots of color. However, at this point, SEGA was unable to replicate the scaling from the arcade game and instead had to fudge the effect by creating a series of sprites for each monster and obstacle at various planes. A proper port of the arcade game with scaling would not appear on the Genesis until the release of Space Harrier for the ill-fated (and ill-planned) 32X attachment for the Genesis.
Space Harrier II is currently available for download via the Virtual Console on the Wii and was also ported to the Amiga.
After the release of Space Harrier II, the series went dark. There was no third game in store for the Genesis and Space Harrier only appeared on the Saturn in a collection of arcade games with Out Run and After Burner II. (That trio was published in America by specialty house Working Designs, not SEGA.) It's easily the best version of Space Harrier for home consoles. If you must own Space Harrier on every imaginable system, the game also appeared in a SEGA arcade collection for the Game Boy Advance.
The Missing Harrier
There is one side story to Space Harrier that never made it out of the development phase: Space Fantasy Zone. Space Harrier and Fantasy Zone were always related to a certain degree -- they both shared the same game universe, for example. This hybrid of the two games was planned for the PC Engine Super CD, which is the TurboGrafx-16 CD in America. The game was close to completion, as leaked ROMs of the game reveal a surprisingly playable shooter.
Space Fantasy Zone does not star the harrier hero, but instead places Opa-Opa in the spotlight. This living ship was previously star of a series of side-scrolling shooters, but in this hybrid, Opa flies directly into the screen just like Space Harrier. In addition to borrowing the perspective and gameplay of Space Harrier, this sorta-sequel brings aboard several Space Harrier enemies. From the Fantasy Zone series, Space Fantasy Zone inherits the game's shop system (cleverly called Weaponalds) and many of the 8-bit shooter's enemies, including bosses. If you are very familiar with Fantasy Zone, you will undoubtedly notice that the horizons are straight out of Fantasy Zone.
As mentioned, Space Fantasy Zone never did make it to retail. But you can play elements of it in the SEGA Ages remake of Fantasy Zone, as the game recasts the boss battles in 3D just like Space Fantasy Zone.
Planet Harriers?
While SEGA has not released a Space Harrier III, it did revisit the series in 2000 with the arcade-only Planet Harriers. While Planet Harriers is technically a direct descendant of Space Harrier, the game actually plays much more like the SEGA Saturn series Panzer Dragoon. Instead of just blasting enemies with individual shots, the Planet Harrier heroes use a lock-on feature to select multiple on-screen targets and then release a multi-threaded blast. You use lock-on fuel to power these huge volleys. The more you bank, the more enemies you can target in a single blast.
Planet Harriers
While Planet Harriers does not take place in the Fantasy Zone, it does borrow from the Master System game of the same name. The heroic ship Opa-Opa makes a cameo appearance in the game. Plus, you earn money while powering through the waves of enemies that can be spent in a shop to buy better lasers. Ultra cool: The shop theme from Fantasy Zone is used here, too.
The hero from Space Harrier does not make an appearance in Planet Harriers. Gamers choose from four different protagonists, such as Cory the nurse (her cannon is a giant hypodermic needle) and Nick the slugger. The goofiest of the quartet is X, a rocker that uses a dual-purpose guitar gun. The reason for the multiple heroes makes sense in the context of the massive arcade cabinet. Planet Harriers features two seats, two monitors, and two sticks. While it can be played alone, it is meant to be enjoyed in pairs, especially since players can team up on bosses and split power-ups.
Planet Harriers may bear a little Space Harrier DNA, but it is a distant relative from the original arcade game. There are only five stages in this game, making it much shorter than AM2's original creation. None of the previous monsters make an appearance, which is unfortunate because some of those classic monsters would have looked good with the new paint job, such as the original dragon from the first game. The white dragon bonus stage is nowhere to be found either.
Thanks to the waning arcade scene, the giant cabinet, and the lack of a name that meant something to arcade goers in 2000, Planet Harriers received little play in America. SEGA never released a home version of Planet Harriers, although there were plenty of rumors that it would appear on either the Dreamcast or GameCube. The arcade game ran on SEGA's Hikaru board, which is an enhanced version of the NAOMI board that made porting a run of SEGA arcade games to the Dreamcast fairly easy. SEGA has announced no plans to ever bring Planet Harriers home, leaving it orphaned in arcades along with other SEGA curiosities like Jambo Safari and Brave Firefighters.
Space Harrier (PS2) Harrier, Come Home
Despite the appearance of Planet Harriers, Space Harrier remains an untapped classic in SEGA's enviable catalog, just waiting for a proper sequel. The gaming giant does return to the well occasionally and release the classics in one form or another, such as the Game Boy Advance port, and a Space Harrier Complete Collection that was only available in Japan. (The package included all of the Harriers prior to Planet Harriers, including Space Harrier 3D and the Game Gear port.) SEGA also allowed the studio 3D Ages to refashion Space Harrier in polygons in 2003 on the PS2. The remake adheres to the general formula of Space Harrier, but the updated visuals are well below what the PS2 is capable of producing. SEGA eventually released this 3D Space Harrier in America as part of the SEGA Classics Collection for the PS2, a budget title that included several 3D remakes, including Out Run and Golden Axe.
But fans hoping for Space Harrier III, Space Harrier 2K8, Space Harrier Xtreme, or whatever SEGA may call it are kept waiting. In recent years, SEGA has been much more amenable to sequels to its classics. Out Run 2 appeared on the Xbox, PS2, and in arcades to general approval. SEGA made a run at several of its properties in the previous generation, such as Shinobi on the PS2 and Panzer Dragoon, House of the Dead, and Toe Jam & Earl on the Xbox. A NiGHTS sequel debuted on the Wii last year. SEGA just announced a new House of the Dead chapter for the Wii and Golden Axe Beast Rider is due on current gen consoles this holiday. So a sequel to Space Harriers is not entirely out of the question. Suzuki is indeed still active at SEGA, even if he is not the star player today that he was when SEGA ruled the arcades and was seriously challenging Nintendo in the 16-bit generation. However, it is more likely at this point for a Harrier sequel to appear from another studio, licensed out by SEGA as what was once planned for the PSP. That title has long since disappeared from the radar, but the hope of Harrier fans has not.
