Space Harrier – Developer Interview Collection
It'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.