The history of arcade games might seem clunky and strange, but without certain key innovations, it's hard to imagine modern gaming at all. When gamers today think of rail shooters, they might think of players furiously smashing buttons, but they may not remember that one of the earliest and most innovative rail shooters of all time was also a flying game about a guy whose primary weapon was also his mode of transportation. The game was Space Harrier, a Sega Arcade Game designed by developer Yu Suzuki. It was released initially on October 2, 1985, and in the next few years would become one of the most important arcade games of all time. Why? There are a few reasons, but the overriding reason Space Harrier remains a classic is that it was just weird enough to be artistically compelling and just simple enough to be playable.
Years after the success of the game, in 2010, Suzuki revealed that market research of the time suggested that 3D shooters simply “didn’t succeed,” signaling that he “shouldn’t make the game.” He pressed ahead anyway because Suzuki realized the problem with previous arcade shooters of this kind is that the target was too small, meaning the goal of Space Harrier was to make the targets small at first, but then, larger as they got closer to the player. Sounds simple, right? It seems that way now, but this gradual size change of advancing targets was a pretty big innovation for video games at the time, and it’s largely thanks to Space Harrier.
But changing the size of moving targets in a video game is pretty meaningless if the video game isn’t fun. Instead, Space Harrier was a rare kind of early 3D shooter that truly went wild with what kinds of targets you might encounter. Sure, there are some requisite flying saucer-type aliens that might remind a player of Galaga, but the fantasy creatures that make up the majority of targets are bonkers to the point of being hilarious. Most famously, there’s a one-eyed alien woolly mammoth, which, despite being very prominent in the marketing for the game, isn’t a particularly important enemy, nor is it hard to blast. (Again, it’s a big target.)
The other fantasy creatures that populate Space Harrier are, in a sense, cut from the same cloth as the one-eyed mammoth. Each makes a certain kind of sense, once you accept everything about the game is fairly nonsensical. There are mutant insect creatures called Canaries, aircraft called Valkyries, and stone heads called Idas, which seem to be a kind of mash-up of something from Easter Island and the talking, flying stone head from the 1974 sci-fi romp, Zardoz.
On top of all of this, the bosses at the end of each level of Space Harrier are a wonderful combination of silly and terrifying. In the first level, Squilla is a massive green dragon with a segmented body and a face that looks perpetually surprised. In the second level, Barbarian is a huge skull that is protected by a kind of squadron of those Ida rock faces I mentioned earlier. Then you’ve got Gordani, a two-headed dragon. This goes on and on, and by the end of the game, you’ll face a gauntlet of all the previous bosses you’ve beaten before.
Today, it’s pretty easy to find versions of Space Harrier that are playable at home. This makes sense: In 1986, the game was ported to several home computer systems, and by 2015, it even existed as a fairly faithful recreation for the Nintendo 3DS.
Still, because Space Harrier is no longer really played in its native arcade form, some element of this game’s innovation and creative zeal can’t be fully felt today. This was a game that was meant to be played with a big joystick, and where the fear of losing more quarters is what motivated you, just as much as blasting all the beasts and fantasy elements. Playing the game 40 years ago felt like something that might never end, but of course, in many ways, for gaming, this was just the beginning.
