After Burner

After Burner (アフターバーナー) is a 1987 arcade rail shooting game developed by Yu Suzuki's Studio 128 team and published by Sega. The game was released in three different types of arcade cabinets - one upright cabinet, and two cockpit versions (one that tilts left and right, and one that rotates). It is the first game in the After Burner series. An updated version was released months later, titled After Burner II. The game is remembered as one of several classic SEGA arcade games that came out in the 80s, gaining attention for its pseudo-3D graphics and then-revolutionary cabinet design.

Gameplay
After Burner is an "on rails" shooter where you pilot a fighter jet inspired by the F-14 Tomcat through 18 levels, destroying enemies with machine gun fire and a limited amount of missiles. The objective is to survive each of the 18 stages, most commonly by avoiding enemy fire, although there are also bonus rounds inbetween every six levels that require you to dodge scenery and not crash. The game also features a lock-on system, which was later adopted by future SEGA rail shooters such as Panzer Dragoon and Rez.

Development
After Burner came right off of the heels of Yu Suzuki's previous classic arcade games for SEGA - after the proven success of said titles, SEGA told him to make a game that "surpassed previous profits", and wanted to give him whatever he needed to make that happen. They introduced a flex time system, meaning developers now had more freedom over when and where to make their games. As such, Suzuki's team began working on the game in private, in a nearby building that came to be dubbed "Studio 128". Development began in December 1986, and took a different approach compared to what they previously had been doing. The team added, changed and tested ideas as they went, which Suzuki himself has admitted in retrospect to have been a somewhat wasteful system. Multiple concepts had to be tested individually, and the most appealing ones were revised and tested again without any clear direction. The group also tested the game using PC-98 computers to prove to SEGA that they could have a hit even without a lot of expensive technology.

The game's aesthetic went through some changes during development. Suzuki originally devised a concept with more of a steampunk aesthetic influenced by the movie Laputa: Castle in the Sky. However, the concept was changed to have a more worldwide appeal, gaining a more realistic style in the same vein as Top Gun. Suzuki originally intended for the game's plot to involve an F-14 Tomcat fighting against Soviet forces. However, pulling from real scenery would be difficult as there was no time to travel to and scout actual locations. In addition, including real landmarks such as the Kremlin would have strained the game's memory capacity too much. So instead, Suzuki used his own visions of different scenery, using a travel magazine as reference. The developers also had issues with such functions as rotating sprite surfaces and missile smoke trails, but they were all eventually figured out - a result of the game's trial-and-error development cycle.

Hiroshi Kawaguchi was once again in charge of the soundtrack, and the first thing he did was buy himself an actual guitar. He wrote almost 100 different pieces, playing for Suzuki in parts and riffs. Some of the songs' titles, such as "Red Out", were used as temporary titles for the game before "After Burner" was settled on. Kawaguchi also took care of the sound effects, poring over dozens of hours of war videos and experimenting with 3D sound. However, his hopes of the game's sounds being as immersive as possible were dashed once it turned out that not only did the machine's movement make it impossible, but the final cabinet design only included four speakers.

SEGA's pressure on the dev team for a quick new hit meant that some ideas didn't get implemented. For example, Suzuki wanted to have pilots parachute out of their planes when shot down and even land on and hijack other people's planes. As for the cabinet design, the deluxe machine was more impressive than the team's previous efforts, but it was scaled back from a prototype - a mass of steel frames with a monitor, delighting the developers who tested it out. However, SEGA deemed the machine too dangerous and had it scaled back somewhat. Still, the final machine remained impressive, and once again played a large factor in the game's eventual success in arcades.