Welcome to the Fantasy Zone
Thanks to Virtual Console Arcade on the Wii I now have Space Harrier, the original, unexpegated arcade version, running perfectly at 60fps on my television - I am extremely happy about this.
Space Harrier is a very special game for me - it was the first console game I ever played, on the Sega Master System (still a great conversion) in my Uncle Allen's bedroom in the late Eighties - '87 to be precise, so I was ... 9 years old. Allen died, tragically young when I was 16 (he was 27), but I think his influence on my life has been pretty far-reaching, given where I am now.
But Space Harrier, Space Harrier really caught my imagination; to this day, the Space Harrier Theme remains one of my favourite pieces of video game music ever, along with the other Sega arcade conversion I played that night, Outrun (Spalsh Wave, if you want to be specific) and the music I got married to (Hyrule Field - yes, from Ocarina, the orchestrated version). It's in a lot of ways the embodiment of why I love video games - it's a pure, bombastic, dynamic and uninhibited fantasy - we know nothing about the Space Harrier, except what we bring to him while wondering how he can fly, is he a human, where did he get his awesome rocket/gun ... we know nothing about the Fantasy Zone, but it rests across the horizon, in a place we never reach in the game, in all it's baroque towered, floating islands, ruined alien ziggurat glory. It's like a dream in twitching button-fingers and bitmaps.
GET READY!
Space Harrier is a very special game for me - it was the first console game I ever played, on the Sega Master System (still a great conversion) in my Uncle Allen's bedroom in the late Eighties - '87 to be precise, so I was ... 9 years old. Allen died, tragically young when I was 16 (he was 27), but I think his influence on my life has been pretty far-reaching, given where I am now.
But Space Harrier, Space Harrier really caught my imagination; to this day, the Space Harrier Theme remains one of my favourite pieces of video game music ever, along with the other Sega arcade conversion I played that night, Outrun (Spalsh Wave, if you want to be specific) and the music I got married to (Hyrule Field - yes, from Ocarina, the orchestrated version). It's in a lot of ways the embodiment of why I love video games - it's a pure, bombastic, dynamic and uninhibited fantasy - we know nothing about the Space Harrier, except what we bring to him while wondering how he can fly, is he a human, where did he get his awesome rocket/gun ... we know nothing about the Fantasy Zone, but it rests across the horizon, in a place we never reach in the game, in all it's baroque towered, floating islands, ruined alien ziggurat glory. It's like a dream in twitching button-fingers and bitmaps.
GET READY!