What it was
A first-person flight shooter in the cockpit of an F-14, based on the 1986 film. There are four missions, each a fight against MiGs: the second adds an enemy aircraft carrier, the third a fortress, and the fourth, flown at night, a space shuttle on its launch pad. Your gun never runs dry, and you carry three kinds of missile, each with its uses. Enemy MiGs fire missiles back, and you either dodge or shoot them down.
The fighting is only half of it. The cockpit shows altitude, air speed, radar and fuel, and from the second mission on you must meet a tanker and line up with its refuelling drogue mid-air or run dry. After every mission you land on a carrier. You get three planes and no continues.
Where it sits in history
Konami adapted it from its own Nintendo VS. System arcade game, VS. Top Gun. It came out in North America in November 1987, in Japan in December, and in Europe a year later. It was the top-selling game in the United States for two weeks in January 1988, passed 1.8 million in American sales by 1989, and reached two million. Konami followed it with Top Gun: The Second Mission.
Reviewers at the time liked the sound and how much Konami got out of two buttons, while calling the graphics sparse. Later ones agreed on the difficulty: AllGame called it arguably the best air combat game on the NES, and the landing and refuelling close to impossible to master.
How it plays today
Rough. The dogfighting is quick and readable, and switching missiles to suit the threat is satisfying. But the refuelling and the landing want a light hand and total concentration, which you will not have at first, and with three planes and no continues every mistake is expensive.
It is worth playing to understand a famous shared memory. Just know going in that clearing all four missions is a real achievement.
Compared with
Why it matters
Two million copies means an awful lot of lounge rooms with much the same story: a clean mission, then a landing gone wrong. Few people remember Top Gun for the MiGs.
Juul calls this the paradox of failure: we work hard to avoid failing in life, yet we pay to fail in games, because failure is what makes us look again and get better. Top Gun's landing is failure in its purest form, a few seconds of concentration that undo everything. Camus wrote 'One must imagine Sisyphus happy.' One must imagine the kid on the carrier approach, eighth try, happy too.
Read: One must imagine Mario happy →
- Juul, J. (2013). The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. MIT Press.
- Camus, A. (1942). The Myth of Sisyphus.
What you're levelling up
You have been training these without noticing. Here is how to do it on purpose, and where it pays off away from the couch. All the skills games teach →
Deep focus
In the game. Refuelling and the carrier landing want a light hand and total concentration, and with three planes and no continues every slip costs you.
Do it on purpose. Practise the approach only. Watch the altitude and air speed, ignore everything else, and count your clean landings.
Off the couch. Doing one thing with your full attention is rare and people notice. Phone away on a date and you're already ahead.
Hand-eye coordination
In the game. From the second mission you line up with a tanker's refuelling drogue mid-air, and it wants small, gentle inputs.
Do it on purpose. Next refuel, use only tiny taps on the pad. Notice how much of each miss came from overcorrecting.
Off the couch. Light hands help backing a trailer, pouring a beer properly and every sport with a ball. Small, calm corrections beat big ones.
Keeping your cool
In the game. Three planes, no continues. The dogfights are fun; the pressure lands when you're lining up the carrier.
Do it on purpose. Before each landing, loosen your grip and breathe out. Note whether the landings go better.
Off the couch. High stakes make tight hands, in exams and job interviews. Loosening on purpose is how you think straight when it counts.
Verdict · 6/10
A real hit with a real sting in its tail: the fighting is fun and the carrier landing is merciless. Respect it before you love it.
