After Burner II

After Burner Deluxe was the first arcade game I ever wanted to own. When I was in junior high, one of these showed up at the Scaggs Alpha Beta grocery store a few miles from my house. We saved our lawn-mowing money and rode our bikes there as often as we could that summer.

The cabinet is a masterpiece. Using electric motors, it pitches and rolls the player along with the game action, while immersing them in stereo sound and flashing lights. The aircraft is controlled with a pretty respectable flight stick which includes a trigger and missile button. I shot some video of the cabinet, which is available on the videos page.

When I started thinking about collecting, this was the first game on the list. It took several years for me to find one in decent shape, and another year-and-a-half for the restoration. I originally thought it would look pretty good in our house, which never would have worked. The cabinet weighs 946 pounds and will not fit though any normal doorway. The only reasonable way to move it is with a forklift.

During the restoration I purchased parts from a lot of different places, and I kept a list of those sources in case they might be handy later. Here's the list.  I also scanned and vectorized the seat artwork and modified the program ROMs to silence the attract mode. The artwork and ROM patch files are available on the downloads page.