After Burner was built to be ridden. The player sat in an enclosed cockpit, gripped a flight stick and flew an F-14 Tomcat low over sea, desert and canyons while the seat rolled with the plane. The enemy came in waves, the missiles came in from behind, and there was no time to do much more than dodge, lock on and fire. Yu Suzuki’s team at Sega made it, and it arrived in 1987, a year after Out Run. Wireframe summed up its appeal years later: it “wasn’t about depth or longevity, but the brief thrill of being thrown around in a hydraulic chair as your F-14 Tomcat pitched and rolled”.
Fast facts
- Developer: Yu Suzuki’s arcade team at Sega, working at a separate office called Studio 128; the team later became Sega AM2.
- Arcade release: 1987; development began in December 1986.
- Cabinets: a standard upright and deluxe sit-in cockpits that moved with the plane.
- View: from behind the plane, flying into the screen.
- Weapons: a cannon that never runs out and a limited stock of lock-on missiles, restocked by refuelling.
- Music: Hiroshi Kawaguchi.
- Update: After Burner II, released months later, added a throttle and more stages.
- Home versions: Sega’s own for the Master System (1987); Activision’s for the Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Atari ST, Amiga and PC (1988–89).
Top Gun and a jet ride
Suzuki had a flying game in mind before he had a film to hang it on. “Before I saw Top Gun, I already had the idea for a fighter jet game taking shape in my mind,” he recalled in interviews from 1988 and 1996, “something more like Laputa: Castle in the Sky.” The team’s composer, Hiroshi Kawaguchi, remembered it differently: “The movie Top Gun was really popular at the time, so we had no trouble at all deciding that our next game, after we finished Out Run, would be dogfighting game with fighter jets.” Wireframe agrees that the team “leaned heavily” on Tony Scott’s 1986 film.
Work began in December 1986 at “Studio 128”, an office about five minutes’ walk from Sega’s headquarters, where the team made After Burner and then Power Drift. The Sega AM2 entry tells how Suzuki kept the place closed to visitors, even Sega’s president.
The cabinet
Suzuki’s earlier games had put players on a motorbike (Hang-On), in a rocking seat (Space Harrier) and in a moving Ferrari (Out Run). After Burner went further. Wireframe describes its “fully enclosed, pod-like cabinet and booming speakers”. ACE listed three versions in January 1989: the upright, a sit-in version that “shook and rattled as you played”, and a deluxe model rough enough “to knock your false teeth into your lap”. Sega Retro describes the two cockpits as one that tilted left and right and one that rotated.
Not everyone was won over. Sinclair User’s coin-op columnist in April 1988 complained that “you’re stuffed into an hydraulically operated cabinet that rolls you around the place like a bucking bronco, inviting you to ‘feel that G-Force’”, and suspected that the game underneath was “merely Space Harrier with planes”. The seat did not turn a full circle. According to Sega Retro, a bootleg After Burner cockpit that moved on three axes turned up in an arcade in Perth, Australia, in 1989, and Sega’s engineers went to look at it. What they built in response was the R360, a cockpit that could spin the player right round; it made its debut with G-LOC in July 1990.
Flying it
The plane flies into the screen, and the player moves it around the view. Enemy jets come from ahead and behind, some firing guns, others missiles. The player’s cannon fires constantly, and a sight locks on to targets for the heat-seeking missiles, which run out. At intervals the F-14 refuels: CRASH described the plane landing on a runway or taking a cable from a tanker in mid-air. Some stages drop the enemy jets and send the player low through a canyon instead. The Spectrum version, CRASH found, had 23 levels, including the refuelling stages.
Activision’s conversions
Activision had the licence for home computers in Britain and sold its versions as Afterburner at the end of 1988: £9.99 on cassette for the Commodore 64, Amstrad and MSX, £12.99 for the Spectrum, and £24.99 for the Atari ST and Amiga. According to Sega Retro, all were conversions of After Burner II. None of the machines could scale sprites in hardware, so the programmers switched between ready-drawn sprites of different sizes instead. Argonaut Software wrote the Atari ST and Amiga versions, which The One reported in October 1988 were being done for Activision’s Electric Dreams label.
The Spectrum version was the surprise. CRASH gave it 86% in its 1988 Christmas special. Nick, on 91%, called it “the one game above almost all others I thought impossible to successfully convert” and found “the speed is fantastic”, though the ground had shrunk from the arcade’s coloured buildings to bushes, and the levels loaded three at a time from tape. Mark, on 83%, thought that without the arcade machine’s speed and detail, “the underlying simplicity of the gameplay is sadly revealed”: “it’s really only a ‘dodge-left/right-and-fire’ game”. Phil, on 89%, doubted its “lasting value”. The review noted that everything in the arcade game had been reproduced “apart from the hydraulic seat!”
ACE made the same point more bluntly. It thought the programmers had done “a first rate job” but asked whether After Burner was suitable for home computers at all: “outside of the sit-in cabinet” it was “dull”. The Commodore 64 version’s graphics were “the worst of the bunch”, colourful but so blocky that it was hard to see where the missiles came from.
Sega’s own Master System version, Sega Retro records, appeared in Japan in December 1987 on a 4-megabit cartridge, large for the console at the time. Sega marketed the Master System in Europe as the faithful way to play its arcade games at home, and its advertisements used the F-14 from After Burner.
Later flights
Sega kept the name going, with After Burner III for the FM Towns and Mega-CD in 1992 and, later, the arcade game After Burner Climax from the AM2 department. The original has come back on generation after generation of home systems, as Wireframe noted in 2020.
Sources
- Wireframe issue 43, September 2020, pp. 84–89, “Developer Profile: Yu Suzuki”: Top Gun, the “fully enclosed, pod-like cabinet and booming speakers”, the hydraulic chair, Hiroshi Kawaguchi’s music, the 1987 release.
- Shmuplations, “After Burner II” (translated developer interviews from 1988 and 1996; web, secondary): Suzuki on Laputa and Top Gun, Kawaguchi on Top Gun, development beginning in December 1986, Studio 128. https://shmuplations.com/afterburner/
- ACE issue 16, January 1989, pp. 54–55: the three arcade cabinets and the home versions.
- Sinclair User issue 73, April 1988, p. 82: coin-op column on After Burner’s cabinet.
- CRASH issue 59, Christmas Special 1988, p. 9: Spectrum review (86% overall; the reviewers’ scores and comments, 23 levels loaded three at a time, the refuelling stages, “apart from the hydraulic seat!”). Issue 61, February 1989, p. 20: Activision’s advertisement with the prices; p. 35: “Afterburner (86%, Issue 59)”.
- Zzap!64 issue 45, January 1989, pp. 30–31: Activision’s advertisement (Amstrad, Atari ST and MSX prices).
- The One issue 1, October 1988, p. 26: Argonaut’s 16-bit Afterburner for Electric Dreams.
- Steve Jarratt and Damien McFerran, SEGA Master System: a visual compendium (Bitmap Books, 2019), p. 90: the Master System marketed on Sega’s arcade games, with the After Burner F-14 in its advertisements.
- Sega Retro, “After Burner”, “After Burner (home computers)”, “After Burner III” and “R360/History” (web, secondary): release dates, the cockpit cabinets, After Burner II’s changes, the Master System cartridge, the home versions as conversions of After Burner II, the sprite technique, Argonaut’s credit, After Burner III, the Perth bootleg and the R360’s debut. https://segaretro.org/After_Burner
- For After Burner Climax, see the Sega AM2 entry and its sources.