Space Harrier Commodore 64

Chris Butler, Rory & Mark Cooksey

en

1

Elite Systems Ltd.

1986

>Our hero, a seasoned veteran of many spacewars is on the scene again.  >This time to save the DRAGON land which is occupied by barbaric and evil  >creatures and controlled by supernatural phenomena. >Elite/Sega proudly presents another in a long line of original game  >concepts in "SPACE HARRIER", an action packed adventure that pits you  >in mortal combat with aliens of another planet. > -- <cite>Instruction Booklet</cite> ***Space Harrier*** is a third-person rail shooter game, released by  Sega in 1985. It was produced by Yu Suzuki, responsible for many popular  Sega games. It spawned several sequels: Space Harrier 3-D (1988), Space  Harrier II (1988), and the spin-off Planet Harriers (2000). Space Harrier was originally made for the arcades, and later saw ports  to many home game systems. Space Harrier's release on the Sega Master  System is notable, as there were two versions: one was just like the  arcade, while the other, entitled Space Harrier 3-D was actually a  sequel. It was one of the first arcade games to use 16-bit graphics and Sega's  "Super Scaler" technology that allowed pseudo-3D sprite-scaling at high  frame rates, with the ability to scale as many as 32,000 sprites and  fill a moving landscape with them, along with over 32,000 colours  displayed simultaneously on the screen. It also introduced a true  analog flight stick for movement, with the ability to register  movement in any direction as well as measure the degree of push,  which could move the player character at different speeds depending on  how far the stick is pushed in a certain direction. The game was  also an early example of a third-person shooter; it was influenced  by the earlier 1982 Sega game Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom, and Space  Harrier in turn influenced later 3D shooters such as Nintendo's  Star Fox/Starwing in 1993. Source:[Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Harrier)