When Space Harrier was a Harrier Jump Jet simulatorTwitter user NAONEAMI2001 recently posted 2

When Space Harrier was a Harrier Jump Jet simulator

Twitter user NAONEAMI2001 recently posted 2 screenshots of a video showing an early version of the Super scaler game Space Harrier.

From one the Read-Only Memory newsletters:
“Yu Suzuki informed us that Space Harrier was initially planned to be a Harrier Jump Jet simulator. After realising that it would take a whopping 64 frames of animation for the jet to rotate convincingly, it was decided to opt for a flying human protagonist who would fight monsters in a fantasy world, as the graphics would not need to be so animation-dependant. The only part of the initial game plan to survive would be the ‘Harrier’ part of the title.“

From a previous interview with Yu Suzuki, originally published on 1UP (not archived)
http://www.1up.com/features/disappearance-suzuki-part-2?pager.offset=4
“This game was not initially my concept. The original concept document was about 100 pages long, on the front and back of each page of the proposal. The game was called “something something Harrier” — I don’t remember the previous name. Originally, the game was set in a realistic setting with a jet that shot missiles into the foreground. But with a jet airplane, a game requires a lot of pattern change data to move back and forth across the screen, so I had to simplify the airplane to the character we ultimately used. But then the game loses its impact — at that point, the concept was no longer attractive. So it became a sci-fi game because we had a person flying on the screen. It was a sci-fi game with fantasy elements because I liked the movie The Neverending Story.
The original guy was a person named Ida. And he had a really big head. So, in the game there’s a part where these big heads made of rock appear and I named them after Ida, pronounced I-DA.“

It seems that the game was completed sometime around November 1985 according to this easter egg:
http://reassembler.blogspot.fr/2013/02/space-harrier-easter-egg-dev-credits.html

On a related note, the Master System version of the game allows the player to use a similar Jet by using a cheat code:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPiYi-wd3Rk

Sources:
https://twitter.com/NAOENAMI2001/status/968922492340289536
https://twitter.com/NAOENAMI2001/status/968729712766914560
https://readonlymemory.vg/