'After Burner: A Ride You’ll Never Forget!’
Remember the days when games came packaged not only with an instruction booklet (sometimes in color!), but also with super-cool advertisement posters for specific games, peripherals, consoles, and current and upcoming games? Sega offered several such posters back in the 80's and 90's that offered not only something ultra-cool to hang on your gaming room wall, but also gave an enticing look at the hottest games on offer for your Sega system (only... which side do you choose to hang up?!).
One of Sega's flagship games in the 80's was the AM2 Arcade hit After Burner. Due to its massive popularity in the arcade, Sega heavily advertised their home port for the Sega Master System at the time with game pack-in posters and also TV commercials (check out our favorite After Burner TV ad on YouTube here).
As far as promotional gaming ads go, this double-sided After Burner poster may very well be one of the coolest offerings to come out of the 80's, with bold Top Gun inspired Sega imagery showing the F-14 Tomcat in a dogfight with enemy fighters, and the classic 'Sega Enterprise' aircraft carrier seen in the water below. It's hard not to start humming the fantastic melodies of Final Take-off, or After Burner when this uber-80's image enters our retinas! The front of the poster also has the very suitable tagline "A Ride You'll Never Forget!".
Here is a scan of the 1988 Sega of America, Inc. / Tonka Corp. After Burner advertisement poster that came packaged with Master System games of the time:
The backside of the poster has a 'New Releases' section showing soon-to-be classics such as Phantasy Star, Shinobi, Thunder Blade, R-Type, Golvellius and more, with a smaller text-only 'Coming Soon' section featuring ALF, Altered Beast, Reggie Jackson's Baseball, Lord of the Sword, Posesidon Wars 3-D, and California Games. The remainder of the poster displays various other Master System classics like Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Fantasy Zone, Space Harrier, and Wonder Boy.
Would you like to see a return of pack-in posters (and instruction booklets) for standard physical game purchases? What were some of your wall-adorned favorites from back in the day?
*Bonus Stage: You'll notice on the bottom right corner of the 'New Releases' side of the poster that it says "Sega From Tonka", as Tonka distributed Sega products in the 1980's.
Man I used to pore over every detail of those posters.
Also I will never be able to see the SMS port of AfterBurner without thinking of Stephen Dorff in the commercial mouthing "Holy sh*t" in the cockpit