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"Get ready!"
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.
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.
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.
He's rescued a lot of princesses, tamed the Triforce, and ki...