THE HISTORY OF AFTER BURNER
Sega’s Yu Suzuki often cites English-language movies as inspirations for his arcade hits. Space Harrier, we’ve learnt, was partly influenced by The Never Ending Story, while Out Run was based on The Cannonball Run, of all things. His main inspiration for After Burner was far more obvious. Top Gun was released in 1986 and quickly became a worldwide hit and cultural phenomenon, so when Suzuki was deciding what to do next after the release of Out Run, he opted for an arcade game involving supersonic F-14 fighter jets. He felt the need for speed basically.
Yet this wasn’t the first time he’d mulled over the concept. As revealed in Retro Gamer 145, when he joined the Space Harrier team, the game was simply known as Harrier and the player controlled a Harrier Jump Jet. Suzuki felt that to depict the jet from multiple angles would take up too much time, and crucially eat up too much memory, so he decided to use a human character in a fantasy setting instead. Although Sega’s Super Scaler technology was ahead of its time, Suzuki constantly demanded more performance to realise his concepts. After Burner would be the first title to utilise Sega’s next-generation X Board which effectively doubled the capabilities of the original Space Harrier hardware.
The three CPU set-up (two 68000s and a Z80) was the same, but both the program memory and graphics memory were doubled to 1MB and 2MB respectively – enough to finally make the jet sprite a reality. The graphics chipset was also bolstered to enable twice as many sprites (256) to be displayed on-screen and increase the framerate from 30 to 60fps. This meant that the air combat would be full-on and blisteringly fast. But that was not all. The, the game’s composer Hiroshi Kawaguchi has revealed that improved sound specs allowed him to synthesise the guitars required for the rock-themed soundtrack.
