If 1980s Sega has a quintessence, it might just be Fantasy Zone. Released in arcades in 1985 and ported to the Master System in 1987, this is easily one of the most whimsically designed and oddest-looking games I’ve ever played.  While the gameplay is basically that of any scrolling shooter, there’s something else at work here; a mad-scientist aesthetic sheathed in surreal pastel artwork.

The game’s hero, Opa-Opa, was Sega’s official mascot up until Sonic’s debut, and the game itself is distinctively Sega: S_T_H, one of our player moderators for PSU, related the following anecdote to me: “During my first year in college, I had been playing the Fantasy Zone remake when a friend came over. Without any background he posed the question… ‘This is a Sega game isn’t it?’”

As soon as you start the first level, you are attacked by what appears to be a wave of carnivorous DNA molecules, while an overhead enemy that looks like a pink UFO with fairy wings and awkward yellow teeth gives birth to a steady stream of blue globules who try to eat you:

The gameplay is a little different than most standard side-scrolling shooters, in that you aren’t compelled to only move from left to right, and the screen isn’t automatically scrolling & pushing you along. The aforementioned pink UFOs are actually enemy bases (which look different each round), and the goal of each level is to destroy a certain number of these, which will then summon the bizarre stage bosses. Advanced gameplay involves a lot of backtracking & looping around enemies as you learn their patterns; circling back to blast enemies you missed & collecting more coins, which can then be used at “shops” that appear once per level on the game screen, where you purchase upgrades for your ships’ weapons & engines.

Did I mention the stage bosses? They’re even more ominous for the way they appear against a flat background, and they look like the sort of spectral geometries you see in the middle of intense fever dreams or after eating the mushrooms you found growing under the kitchen sink:

My determinedly low-tech screen shots may not do the game’s look & feel proper justice, so check out a full play-through of the game here.

It’s not that Fantasy Zone is the only surreal game ever made, of course. Not by a long shot. Early console games, with limited graphical capabilities, often had inexplicable enemies or items, the result of a designer doing what they could with the technology they had available, and there are justly famous games out there with ample supplies of weird whimsy, and even weirder gameplay. What I like about Fantasy Zone is that it fits the aesthetic that made 1980s Sega games so much fun—gameplay designed around core arcade concepts, but with decidedly curveball touches that come from creative programming and truly distinctive artwork & music.

Fantasy Zone makes me think about how ingrained the language of video games is for anyone who’s grown up playing them—it’s hard to imagine what this game would look like to someone without any gaming experience; this is a completely surreal game, but with core game ideas (power ups, bad guys, your own ship) that we recognize innately. There is something hard-coded into gamer DNA that recognizes floating green eyeballs as “bad” and coins as “good”.

There’s actually a neat layer of strategy to the game, because the items you buy in the shop are useable for either a limited time or until you lose a life. You can buy them back, but each time you do they go up in price, meaning you have to decide carefully how to portion out your armada throughout the game.

After defeating the last stage boss, you fight, in quick procession, all of the game’s bosses in a row, followed by the “final boss”, the leader of the forces invading the Fantasy Zone, who turns out to be—wait for it—the long lost father of the player! Oh no! Before dying, Opa-Opa’s enormous father sheds a single tear. I kid you not:

I should confess that scrolling shooter games have never been my forte, and I’m by no means a connoisseur of the genre. Astro Warrior was probably the first Sega game I ever played and remains a favorite, and like any red-blooded American male who ate at pizza parlors, I fed a small ransom of quarters to 1942 and its ilk, but that was two decades ago.

Fantasy Zone is by no means an excessively challenging game, but it is definitely a fun game, and laid a lot of groundwork for the odder titles in the genre. When I watch something like one of the “bullet curtain” offshoots of the shooter genre, I cannot fathom the twitch-gameplay skills required to master it. It literally makes my wrists hurt just watching videos of the Touhou series.

And yet, there’s something about these games: they call upon your survival instinct and hone it to a sharp point, and there isn’t what one would call character development in them, but in turn the scrolling-shooter games always seem to have some of the most surreal and impressionistic artwork of any game genre. Because the games are predicated upon that most basic of gaming tenets—don’t run into the bad guys—the games are, in a way, entirely about style and artwork—survival is the method used the navigate the scenery.

For this reason, scrolling shooters tend to have some of the most vividly interesting looks of any genre of game. Another Sega game, for the 32X—Kolibri—comes to mind here (and this game may definitely be suitable for a future installment of this blog): it’s easy enough to see the connection between the vivid colors of Kolibri and the dreamlike stages of Fantasy Zone.

The action in these shooters is usually intense enough that you don’t exactly have time to enjoy the artwork. The longer I played Fantasy Zone the less I was thinking about the bright, brilliant graphics and the more I was obsessing over the increasingly homicidal patterns of the various in-game enemies.

However, the graphics will be there well after you finish playing: if you’ve ever played Fantasy Zone, or any intense shooter of this type, you get to see a full replay of all the graphics as soon as you close your eyes to try to go to sleep at night – and in some cases, for years afterwards.

Final note: Thanks to my new position as a PSU GM, I haven’t had near the time to update this as I would like. Things are calming down somewhat, & I would like to make more posts, more regularly. It will sadly (for me, at least) be time to soon leave behind the Master System, and to move on to the indomitable decade of the 1990s. There are also some great blog projects planned for a retrospective on the beloved Dreamcast in future posts. Stay tuned!