Video of Namco's 1993 Air Combat coin-op arcade machine - Before PlayStation & Ace Combat existed

[parallaxscroll]

This was the very first game, designed in 1992, seen in U.S. arcades in 1993 and where the later Ace Combat series on PlayStation originated from.

http://i.imgur.com/xlrhkXj.jpg


The Air Combat arcade machine of '92 / '93 used Namco's System 21 arcade board with flat-shaded polygons. The original name for the System 21 hardware used in older Namco arcade games such as Divers eyes and Winning Run was the "Polygonizer".

The Polygonizer / System 21 hardware was Namco's equivalent of SEGA's Model 1 arcade board co-designed with General Electric Aerospace for flat shaded polygons used in Virtua Racing (1992) and Virtua Fighter (1993).

Video of the coin-op arcade Air Combat machine:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvO-mewW3Z8


The first PlayStation game, Ace Combat in Japan / Air Combat in North America, was released in 1995. It was really a whole new game and not based directly on the arcade Air Combat from 1993.

http://i.imgur.com/wE9nIlF.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/48TLRPE.jpg




The arcades got another game in 1995, Air Combat 22:

http://i.imgur.com/xIur4JA.jpg



It was called Air Combat 22 because it ran on Namco's System Super 22 arcade hardware. The System Super 22 was a more powerful upgrade of the System 22 hardware that powered the original arcade Ridge Racer, which itself was a lot more powerful than the original PlayStation and Namco's PlayStation-based arcade board, System 11, first used in arcade Tekken.

Air Combat 22 was totally different than Ace Combat 2 for PS1 released in 1997. This time, Air Combat 22 had fully texture mapped polygons unlike the first arcade game. Air Combat 22 is extremely rare, I played the arcade machine only on time in my life in the late 90s.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Combat

[FrankSerpico]

^This local kid's "entertainment complex" with mini golf, go karts and such called the Foam Factory had an Ace Combat 22 cabinet I wasted a lot of money on. Pretty sure that and Top Skater were their only 75 cent games. I never knew it was that rare, guess I'm lucky

[Flashback2012]

I was working at an arcade when the arcade Air Combat game came out. Namco and Sega were really trying to 1-UP each other at the time and it was pretty amazing to see games like Virtua Fighter, Ridge Racer, Tekken, Virtua Racing, and Air Combat get released at a time when 2D sprite based gaming was still king. I picked up Air Combat for my PlayStation when it first came out and was rather disappointed it wasn't more faithful to its arcade namesake. At the time I wasn't aware of the Ace Combat name and didn't realize it was a sub-series/spin-off. It was still enjoyable and I've been picking up the Ace Combat games ever since; the only one I'm missing is the most recent one on PS3/XB360.

[parallaxscroll]

I played the original Air Combat a lot at the Cyber Station arcade in Golf Mill Shopping Center in Niles, IL. just barely outside of Chicago, in 1993. The final opponent on the hardest difficulty was a Northrop YF-23, and man, it was very hard to kill since missiles wouldn't work, only guns. I finished the game & gunned down the YF-23 probably three or four times, but most of time, the time ran out.


I got to play Air Combat 22 only one time.

The only place I ever saw an Air Combat 22 machine was at Aladdin's Castle in the Hawthorn Shopping Center in Vernon Hills, IL (northern chicago suburbs). The graphics were MUCH better, but still an arcade game with limited choices.