Yu Suzuki, the legendary game designer of SEGA and father of the best pseudo-3D games of the past, said that his design "were always 3D from the beginning. All the calculations in the system were 3D, even from Hang-On. I calculated the position, scale, and zoom rate in 3D and converted it backwards to 2D. So I was always thinking in 3D."

But why?

Space Harrier (1985) is probably the most representative game of this way of thinking games. And, despite the game abstract artistic style, inspired by Roger Dean, and the sci-fi anime inspiration, everything was for the sake of realism - or, better, for the player immersion: Sega didn't want to make a cockpit-style rolling cabinet version of the game due to high construction costs but Suzuki was ready to offer his salary as compensation if the game failed. But the game did great instead.

Suzuki is the same that, one year later, added an interactive car radio and non linear gameplay to his racer Out Run (1986) (we already covered that before), giving the player a way to make his gameplay experience more personal, and his pursue to the true 3D culminated with his Virtua Racing (1992) which outperformed his rival 3D racers adding multiple camera angles, which allowed the player to choose his own most immersive view, and 3D human NPCs, boosting the authenticity of the experience.

In Suzuki games there's been a steady growing of immersive elements, from the invisible 3D math behind his early games to the innovative soundtrack and camera angle selectors. With his obsession of dragging the player into the the videogame experience, obtained mixing realism and customization, Suzuki defined many key guidelines of modern videogames and deserves his role of one of the most important fathers of videogames.

I wonder if virtual reality is the ultimate weapon of immersive videogames, giving the player the most subjective view ever... or forcing the point of view to the first person is a step back in the player experience customization. Now is the moment of truth!

Anyway, thank you so much, Yu Suzuki!

Plot!

The evil dragons invaded the Fantasy Planet! You, the Planet Runner, are the planet only hope: fly with your jetpack across the planet, dodge the obstacles in your path, shoot the enemies down and drive the dragons away!

Use UP/DOWN/LEFT/RIGHT for moving and the A BUTTON for firing. And that's all!

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Install / Add to home View game sources ...or play it online below!