After Burner II
After Burner II: Sega’s F-14 Arcade Shooter
Sega put After Burner II in arcades in 1987. It’s a flight combat game where you fly an F-14 Tomcat and shoot down enemy jets across 23 stages.
You launch from a carrier called the SEGA Enterprise, and the jet moves forward on its own from there. Your job is aiming and staying alive. Enemy fighters swarm in from the horizon, missiles come at you from every angle, and the whole thing moves fast enough that memorizing patterns matters more than reflexes after a few runs.
How Do You Play After Burner II?
You slide a targeting reticle around the screen and shoot whatever flies into it. The vulcan cannon never runs out of ammo, so hold it down. Missiles are limited, and they lock on, so save them for tight formations instead of spraying them at single planes.
The throttle is the big addition over the first After Burner. Speed up to blow past a jet sitting on your tail, or slow down and let it overshoot you so you can shoot it from behind. Rolling left or right shakes off missiles that have already locked on. Your hitbox feels bigger than it looks, which is most of why the game is hard.
What Happens Across the 23 Stages
- Stage 1: takeoff from the SEGA Enterprise, straight into air-to-air combat.
- Stages 5 and 13: refueling breaks with no enemies at all. A tanker plane tops you up and restocks your missiles.
- Stages 8 and 17: low canyon runs against enemy microwave stations on the ground. Different targets, tighter walls.
- Stage 23: the autopilot brings you down on the carrier deck. Nothing shoots at you. You just watch.
The rest are air combat, and they get meaner as the numbers climb. Sega slipped cameos into the landing scenes too: the motorcycle rider from Hang-On shows up at the first one, and the Testarossa from Out Run turns up at the second. Small stuff, but it’s the kind of detail that made these cabinets feel handmade.
Yu Suzuki designed it at Sega AM2, with Hiroshi Kawaguchi on music. It ran on Sega X Board hardware, and the deluxe cabinet was a sit-down cockpit on hydraulics that tilted with your plane. You get the game part here without the hydraulics. You can play After Burner II online in your browser, no emulator setup and no download needed.
As always, remember to have fun!
