The Sega Hang-On arcade cabinet. Sega didn't just want you to play a motorcycle racing game. It wanted you to ride one.

I've always had a particular affection for Sega's arcade games from the 1980s. I was a red-blooded American boy who loved cars, motorcycles, airplanes, and anything that went fast. Naturally, I was fascinated by games like Hang-On, Out Run, and Power Drift. Sega had an uncanny ability to make its arcade games feel like a physical experience. Sometimes that meant sitting on a fiberglass motorcycle and leaning into turns, and sometimes it meant climbing into an enormous hydraulic contraption that shook you around while you pretended to fly a fighter jet.

But what fascinated me just as much as the machines themselves was how convincingly Sega could create the illusion of three-dimensional worlds using what were, fundamentally, two-dimensional graphics.

The technique became known as Super Scaler, and it produced some of the most spectacular arcade games of the 1980s. Instead of constructing environments out of polygons, as modern games do, these machines manipulated flat images called sprites, making them larger or smaller and moving them around the screen to suggest depth and perspective.

I had a Sega Genesis and eventually a 32X, so I kept playing games like After Burner and Space Harrier well into the 1990s. Even when polygonal 3D was beginning to take over, I remained fascinated by these older tricks.

There's something particularly satisfying about understanding how developers managed to squeeze such elaborate illusions out of primitive hardware. Sprite scaling, parallax scrolling, scanline counters, palette manipulation, and carefully timed changes to video hardware could produce effects that seemed almost impossible given the limitations of the machines.

Recently, while combing through my emulated arcade collection, I stumbled across a particularly early example that I'd somehow never heard of: SubRoc-3D, released by Sega in 1982.

And it sent me down quite a rabbit hole.

A forgotten ancestor of Space Harrier

At first glance, SubRoc-3D isn't particularly impressive by modern standards. It's a fairly straightforward first-person shooting gallery. You're looking out over an ocean, firing torpedoes at enemy warships and missiles at aircraft and flying saucers.

You don't really travel through a world in the way you do in After Burner. Instead, your position is essentially stationary, while you pan left and right and aim higher or lower to engage targets. You can shift the action between naval combat and aerial combat.

The graphics are low-resolution and rather crudely drawn, but there's also a surprising amount of detail. Enemy ships and aircraft approach from the distance, growing larger as they move toward you. Objects sweep across the horizon, and incoming projectiles create an impression of motion through three-dimensional space.

The game even changes the colors of its environment to suggest the passage of time. The sky and sea transition through daylight, dusk, darkness, and dawn. It's an early example of the sort of atmospheric palette manipulation that Sega would use to wonderful effect in later games like Out Run and After Burner.

I immediately recognized elements of Space Harrier, G-LOC, and After Burner. There was something about the way enemies approached the viewpoint, and the way the horizon and sky established the illusion of a larger world, that felt unmistakably Sega.

But this was 1982, three years before Space Harrier and six years before Power Drift.

I wanted to know where it came from.

Before Super Scaler, there was Turbo

Turbo (1981) already featured hardware sprite scaling, allowing cars and roadside objects to change size as they approached.

Technically, SubRoc-3D wasn't Sega's first arcade game to scale sprites in hardware. That distinction belongs to an earlier generation of machines, including Turbo, released in 1981.

Turbo is a racing game that looks remarkably ambitious for its age. Cars approach from the distance, buildings and scenery slide past the roadside, and the environment changes as you race through different areas.

To appreciate what made this special, it helps to understand what video game hardware was normally doing around 1981.

A typical arcade machine displayed graphics using small blocks of image data called sprites or tiles. These were stored in memory and drawn directly by specialized video circuitry. If you wanted an enemy to appear larger, you generally needed to have a larger version of that enemy already drawn and stored somewhere.

That works, but it requires a lot of memory, which was expensive.

Sega's solution was to build hardware capable of changing the size of the image as it was being drawn.

How do you scale a sprite without a GPU?

Modern graphics cards can resize textures, transform geometry, and render millions of polygons. Early arcade hardware couldn't do any of that in the modern sense.

Instead, Sega's engineers exploited the fact that a CRT television draws its picture one line at a time. The electron beam sweeps across the screen horizontally, moves down a line, and repeats.

If you know precisely where that beam is going to be at any given moment, you can arrange for specialized circuitry to feed it carefully selected pixels.

To make an image larger, the hardware can repeat pixels and lines. To make it smaller, it can skip some of them. Change how quickly the source image is sampled, and you change how large it appears on the screen.

Sega's early implementation was known as VCO Object hardware, referring to the voltage-controlled oscillators used in its scaling circuitry. These helped generate the variable timing needed to stretch and compress sprite graphics.

This wasn't a general-purpose computer calculating a 3D world and rendering it into a framebuffer. It was dedicated electronics manipulating graphics as the video signal was being generated.

That distinction is fascinating to me. The hardware wasn't really drawing three-dimensional objects. It was performing carefully controlled tricks with two-dimensional pictures, fast enough to make the illusion convincing.

Other tricks completed the effect. Scrolling backgrounds could move at different speeds to create parallax. Scanline-based effects could make the road curve or change shape as it approached the bottom of the screen. Palette registers could be changed to alter the colors of entire scenes without redrawing their contents.

All these little illusions could be combined into something far more convincing than any one of them would be on its own.

And SubRoc-3D took this technology in a direction that Turbo hadn't.

But this one was actually in 3D

Sega Subroc 3d Arcade cabinet

The original SubRoc-3D cockpit cabinet. Rather than looking directly at a monitor, players peered into a mechanical stereoscopic viewer.

Here's the really interesting part: SubRoc-3D wasn't just simulating depth using scaling tricks. It was also displaying actual stereoscopic 3D.

Sega developed the game in collaboration with Matsushita Electric, the Japanese electronics company now better known as Panasonic. Matsushita had been experimenting with stereoscopic television systems, and the two companies adapted that technology for an arcade machine.

The result was one of the earliest commercial stereoscopic video games, and a remarkable piece of engineering for 1982.

Unlike later systems that used electronic LCD shutter glasses, SubRoc-3D used a mechanical shutter system built directly into its viewing apparatus.

Inside the periscope-shaped viewer were two rotating discs, each partly transparent and partly opaque. The monitor rapidly alternated between two slightly different pictures of the same scene, one intended for the left eye and one for the right.

The rotating discs were synchronized with the display so that only the appropriate eye could see each image.

The monitor refreshed at 60 Hz, presenting alternating perspectives so that each eye received 30 images per second. Your brain combined those two views into a single scene with a genuine sense of depth.

The game used the same basic VCO Object hardware family as Turbo, but with additional object memory to accommodate the stereoscopic images.

So SubRoc-3D was doing two different kinds of 3D at once: scaling two-dimensional sprites to simulate objects approaching through space, and presenting different perspectives to each eye to create binocular depth perception.

It's a rather elegant combination, especially considering the technology available at the time.


This original 1982 Sega flyer explains the rotating shutter mechanism. The sales pitch describes a stereoscopic system that doesn't require the player to wear separate glasses.

The machine came in upright and enclosed cockpit versions, with the deluxe cabinet weighing more than 370 pounds. It offered a private viewing experience, stereo audio effects, and physical controls that reinforced the sensation of looking through a submarine's periscope.

Unfortunately, all this exotic hardware also made the machine expensive and complicated to maintain. The mechanical shutters and their motors were vulnerable to wear and malfunction.

The 3D mechanism could even be disabled by arcade operators.

That helps explain why the game is so obscure today. Most emulation reproduces the graphics without the original stereoscopic viewing apparatus, so a major part of the experience is simply missing.

A little piece of virtual reality history

Something else occurred to me while reading about SubRoc-3D: this machine belongs to the early history of virtual reality.

Not because it was VR in the modern sense. There was no head tracking, no freely navigable three-dimensional environment, and no simulation of a world around the player's body.

But it did combine several ideas that would become central to immersive display technology.

The player looked through a binocular viewer that blocked out much of the surrounding arcade. Each eye received a different perspective. The controls allowed the player to move the view and aim into a simulated environment. Audio effects reinforced the illusion of objects passing through space.

It's worth remembering that stereoscopic technology is much older than video games. Stereoscopes were popular in the nineteenth century, and researchers were experimenting with head-mounted computer displays by the 1960s. Ivan Sutherland's famous Sword of Damocles system, developed in 1968, was already exploring tracked, stereoscopic computer graphics.

SubRoc-3D wasn't the invention of VR, but it brought part of that lineage into a commercial entertainment machine.

Its stereoscopic display was mechanically primitive, but the underlying idea is recognizable: show each eye a slightly different view of a virtual scene, and let the brain do the rest.

Later active-shutter systems would replace those rotating discs with electronically controlled liquid-crystal lenses. Sega itself would eventually release the SegaScope 3-D Glasses for the Master System in 1987, bringing the same general principle into the living room.

The technology behind a modern VR headset is vastly more sophisticated, but the basic trick of binocular stereoscopy is the same.

There's something delightful about the idea that an early-1980s arcade machine was already pursuing the same goal as modern immersive gaming: convincing your brain that the thing you're looking at exists somewhere beyond the glass.

The connection goes all the way back to 1960s Sega

As I investigated the game, I found myself reading Ken Horowitz's The Sega Arcade Revolution: A History in 62 Games, which traces the company's history through some of its most important machines.

It turns out that SubRoc-3D has an even older ancestor.

Sega Periscope cabinet

In the mid-1960s, Sega developed an electromechanical submarine game called Periscope. It was one of the company's first major international arcade successes, and it didn't use video graphics at all.

Instead, players peered into a viewing apparatus and launched simulated torpedoes at enemy ships using a combination of physical models, lights, mirrors, and mechanical effects.

It was an elaborate amusement machine that attempted to create an immersive experience through engineering rather than software.

One of the people involved in the original Periscope was Sega engineer Shikanosuke Ochi, who later served as technology director on SubRoc-3D.

That connection is wonderful. Nearly two decades apart, the two machines explore essentially the same fantasy: looking through a periscope and attacking distant enemies. The first accomplished it through electromechanical theatrical effects, while the second used electronic graphics and stereoscopic imagery.

Ochi was part of an earlier generation of Sega engineers who developed attractions involving novel mechanical controls, feedback effects, and unusual display technologies. They weren't simply making video games. They were building machines that did things people had never experienced before.

In retrospect, Sega's later fascination with moving cabinets, motorcycle controls, steering wheels, and hydraulic flight simulators doesn't seem like such an abrupt development.

It was part of the company's identity from the beginning.

From SubRoc to Space Harrier, After Burner, and beyond

Power Drift
After Burner II (1987)
Space Harrier (1985)



The years after SubRoc-3D saw Sega rapidly develop its sprite-scaling technology.

Another 1982 release, Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom, used related hardware to create a fast-moving science-fiction landscape, complete with approaching enemies and an elaborate sense of forward motion.

By 1985, Yu Suzuki and Sega's arcade development teams had turned these ideas into something extraordinary with Hang-On and Space Harrier.

The newer Super Scaler hardware could manipulate more sprites at higher speeds, with greater flexibility and more convincing visual effects. Space Harrier combined huge approaching enemies, scrolling landscapes, and a constantly shifting viewpoint into a spectacular fantasy world.

Out Run followed in 1986, creating a wonderfully colorful road trip complete with branching routes, roadside scenery, and dramatic changes in lighting.

After Burner arrived in 1987, putting players in the cockpit of a fighter jet and surrounding them with scaled aircraft, missiles, clouds, and explosions.

And then there's Power Drift, one of my favorites, released in 1988. Using Sega's Y Board hardware, it pushed sprite manipulation to absurd extremes. Its racetracks dip, climb, bank, and twist like roller coasters, while the whole apparent world seems to rotate around the player's buggy.

None of these games needed to construct their environments out of polygons. They were still fundamentally manipulating flat images, but the hardware had become powerful enough to make the illusion astonishingly fluid.

Eventually, polygonal 3D won out. Sega itself would help lead that transition with games like Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter.

But there's something distinctive about the sprite-scaling era that never quite carried over.

These games weren't trying to reproduce a physically accurate three-dimensional world. They were trying to create a convincing impression of speed and movement using whatever tricks would work.

And because the tricks were so specific to the hardware, the results often had an aesthetic all their own.

The joy of finding a missing link

I don't think SubRoc-3D is likely to become one of my favorite arcade games. The gameplay is simple, the graphics are rough, and without the original cabinet and stereoscopic viewer, there's only so much of the experience that emulation can preserve.

In fact, when I first launched it using FinalBurn Neo, I couldn't even get the sound working. It turns out the original used discrete analog sound circuitry, and the emulator needs a separate collection of recorded audio samples.

But that's part of what makes these old games interesting to me.

I love finding a forgotten piece of technology that helps explain how something I remember fondly came to exist.

SubRoc-3D sits at a fascinating intersection. It's a descendant of Sega's electromechanical amusements, an early experiment in hardware sprite scaling, a commercial stereoscopic display, and a precursor to the immersive arcade experiences that defined the company's golden age.

It also reminds me that technological progress in video games wasn't always a straight line toward polygon counts, shaders, and texture resolution.

Sometimes it involved spinning a pair of plastic discs in front of a television. Sometimes it meant manipulating the timing of an electron beam so that a tiny picture of an airplane could appear to fly toward you. Sometimes it meant building a giant fiberglass motorcycle and asking someone to climb aboard.

I miss that period of experimentation, when the arcade cabinet itself was part of the game and engineers seemed willing to try just about anything to make the experience more convincing.

And I think that's why I keep returning to these old Sega games. Not just because they remind me of being a kid, but because I'm still impressed by the ingenuity that went into making them.

Forty-four years later, SubRoc-3D is still teaching me something about how video games learned to create worlds.

Further reading and image credits