Space Harrier II

Whether you're playing Space Harrier II for the first time or seeing this surreal painting by Masashi Iwasaki for the first time, one thing becomes very clear very quickly; Space Harrier II is bananas.

This is one of the occasions where we were lucky enough for the Genesis to get the same artwork that the Japanese Mega Drive did, and I'm really glad too because I can't imagine anything else holding a candle to this. The first time I saw this I was not familiar at all with the game, and I assumed that this was some extremely out-there interpretation from the artist's imagination, based on some very sparse details. Nope. This is literally the game represented in art. Everything about this bizarre image is right out of the game. Sega must have been either throwing darts at a board full of random words when they created this game, or they were on some very potent substances.

One fun thing about working on this was having access to a new and improved image of our main character from Sega thanks to the mobile port icons. I was able to fit this new version over the old version and incorporate it into the original image in a way that doesn't look out of place, and provides a much nicer visual. The original always bugged me because he looked like he was holding a big jawbreaker inside his left cheek, so being able to replace it with one that doesn't suffer so much from this issue was great. I also did some custom coloring as well just for fun.

Everything else was as great as you could want and just needed standard upscaling, so that just became a matter of splitting off the original scan into a few different black and white detail layers created from anisotropic filtering and high-pass filters, mixing and matching them, and then adding the color back over top.

Logo...

I decided to re-create the Space Harrier II logo completely from scratch by creating a bump map and using simulated lighting to obtain a nice shine effect, then glow effects and transparencies to give it that cool gelatinous alien look. Nothing fancy with the Roman numeral two though; just went for a gold look without being too realistic.