Thunder Blade is one of the Sega arcade games that gained a bad reputation from the mid to late 1980s. Like many of its siblings, it was not nearly powerful enough for the faithful home system ports of the time. However, while After Burner, Space Harrier, and even Galaxy Force benefited from re-releases on 32-bit and later platforms, Thunder Blade did not receive the same treatment.
Of course, this is a shame because the original arcade game is actually quite cool. The concept was born from one of Sega’s developers who was inspired by Roy Scheider’s Blue Thunder on late-night TV and decided to create a loose video game based on helicopter action footage (the title screen was even digitized from the film). It runs on the classic Sega X Board and uses Sega’s popular “super-scaling” technique for some quite impressive effects. There are two separate camera angles: a top view and a shoulder view.
The perspective of the game is impressive; since your helicopter is angled downwards, the view tilts slightly, which is unique. You have both a machine gun and missiles in your arsenal, both with unlimited ammunition—the only difference is the attack ranges. In addition to moving left and right, you can impressively scale the ground back and forth with smooth animations to gain or lose altitude. Just watching the action is incredibly cool, especially after getting hit and returning to the sky. The helicopter has a constant forward momentum—while you technically can’t move back and forth in the visible play area, you can change your speed, including a super-fast turbo mode.
There are a series of great effects at work here. Other Sega “super-scaling” games like OutRun employed a bit of visual trickery by laying down several of the same tiles in succession, each positioned and scaled slightly differently, creating the illusion of a solid object like a canyon wall. Clearly, the technique looks a bit quaint in hindsight, but it was remarkable for its time. Due to its unique perspective, Thunder Blade does something different. The buildings and mountains found throughout the game are completely layered tiles, but each tile moves at a different speed as you fly past, creating a depth illusion in a truly 2D game without the use of polygonal fantasy. Quite clever!
