After Burner
1987 video game
After Burner is a 1987 combat flight simulation video game developed by Studio 128 and published by Sega for arcades. The player controls an American F-14 Tomcat fighter jet and must clear each of the game's 18 stages by destroying enemies. The plane is equipped with a machine gun and a limited supply of heat-seeking missiles. The game uses a third-person perspective, as in Sega's earlier Space Harrier (1985) and Out Run (1986). It runs on the Sega X Board arcade system which is capable of surface and sprite rotation. It is the fourth Sega game to use a hydraulic "taikan" motion simulator arcade cabinet, one that is more elaborate than their earlier "taikan" simulator games. The cabinet simulates an aircraft cockpit, with flight stick controls, a chair with seatbelt, and hydraulic motion technology that moves, tilts, rolls and rotates the cockpit in sync with the on-screen action.
Designed by Sega veteran Yu Suzuki, After Burner was intended to be Sega's first "true blockbuster" video game. Development began in December 1986, shortly after the completion of Out Run, and was kept as a closely guarded secret within the company. Suzuki was inspired by the 1986 films Top Gun and Laputa: Castle in the Sky; he originally planned for the game to have an aesthetic similar to Laputa, but went with a Top Gun look to make the game approachable for worldwide audiences.
“After Burner” enters the record as 1987 video game. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Burner, video and game can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“After Burner” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Burner, video and game provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q388929. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987, 1985 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “After Burner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.