Hello friends. Dan Ryan here, you… there. Thank you so much for checking in and if you like what you see please comment and share. It’s been a minute since the last 8-Bit Blockbusters post. Unfortunately, there haven’t been any movies/games worth writing about since I posted about The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Thankfully, it’s time to buzz the tower once again as we celebrate the 40th! anniversary of the legendary Top Gun. 

Based on the 1983 article Top Guns by Ehud Yonay and published in California Magazine, yes the script was indeed written based on this particular magazine article, the film Top Gun starring Tom Cruise was released to theaters in May of 1986. The film follows young naval aviators Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) and his close friend Nick “Goose” Bradshaw (Anthony Edwards) as they train at the United States Navy's Fighter Weapons School, Top Gun, at Naval Air Station Miramar in San Diego, California. It is at its core, a perfectly average film that is at once buoyed by some truly incredible aerial combat sequences that were hitherto for unseen and unimaginable by movie going audiences of the time while also bogged down to near unwatchable levels by almost everything else that happens in between the fly fly pew pew scenes. It’s a testament to the action sequences, and the admitted impact of the loss of Goose, that this movie has garnered the following it has. Make no mistake, this thinly veiled recruitment video, yes there were military sign up stations at theaters showing this film in 1986, yes that is super gross, is a truly horrible, terrible, no good, very bad movie. But dammit, it just works. The 80’s were a different time man. We didn’t need much. I was 5 when this movie hit theaters and while I don’t think anyone took me to the local movie house to see it there, you bet I saw it on home video, a lot. It’s estimated that close to 48 million tickets were sold during the original theatrical run of Top Gun giving it a worldwide box office total of $353.8 million dollars. ($952 million adjusted for 2026 dollars) That is a staggering amount of money for a film whose budget was only $15 million and was widely panned on release. The impact of Top Gun was seen all over the world with fighter pilots instantly becoming cool. Estimates show an 8% increase in U.S. naval enlistments after the release of the flick, modest sure but an increase nonetheless, as well as being the direct inspiration for Misa Matsushima, the first Japanese fighter pilot. The soundtrack, one of the most popular of all time, has reached a 9x Platinum Certification, 9 million sold, and the songs “Danger Zone” by Berlin and “Take My Breath Away” by Kenny Loggins are indelible parts of the Gen X/Z zeitgeist. The franchise has remained popular throughout its 40 year history spawning a sequel in 2022, Top Gun: Maverick, with a third film supposedly on the way, and 18 video games. 

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Released a year after the film, Top Gun from Konami is a first person aerial combat fighter with an absolutely rage inducing landing sequence. Seriously, talk to people who played this game as little kids and I’d bet dollars to donuts that one of the first things they mention is that damn landing sequence. Up, up, right, right, left, left, up, up, speed down, speed up, I’m trying! Dear god I’m trying why won’t you just land you stupid plane I hate you and your stupid wings and your stupid boat and great now I broke another controller and yes I know I have to return it but no I didn’t get any further than the last time we rented it and yes I am going to rent it again because fly fly pew pew but still the landing! Sorry… anyway what’s here is actually a really solid air combat title. Players are given the option of 3 different missile types before take off. Each missile has a limited number of uses based on their overall power. Lots of weak missiles or a few really powerful ones… what to do, what to do. After making your choice you take off and are given a nice, detailed view of the cockpit with open sky ahead of you. Enemy fighters come in from all directions, as shown on the cockpit radar, and your job is to blast them out of the sky with your missiles or unlimited machine gun fire. After destroying the requisite enemy planes, you must land back on the aircraft carrier from which you took off. And it is this sequence that stopped many gamers cold. Watching a YouTube video it looks easy enough but I can promise you, it is absolute hell. There are also refueling sections that are equally maddening but I’d argue many gamers don’t carry the same hate in their hearts for those sections because they didn’t continually lose a life to them. The game itself is four stages long and gives you three lives. If you cannot land the plane, again I cannot stress how difficult it truly is, you will never get to the final stage where you must destroy an enemy space shuttle because, 80’s? I have a lot of nostalgia for this game, flaws and all. I never owned it as a kid but rented it time and time again. How could I not? The dog fighting is incredibly fun and the game controls really well, a huge achievement on the NES controller. Most air combat titles at the time were side scrollers or pseudo 3-D, top down experiences; a limitation of the time and place where these types of games were released. Now, I love games like 1943 and Sky Kid but they weren't really anything like the real thing. But then there was Top Gun, the action packed evolution to the boring old Flight Simulator. The graphics are nice minus the backgrounds which are nothing more than solid blocks of color. The music, while exceedingly minimal, is well done. The game most importantly, feels good. The take off to dog fighting was genuinely thrilling. The movie made fighter pilots cool and the game made being a fighter pilot cool. Overall Top Gun for the NES is a fun time, assuming you can actually land the damn plane. As an aside, Kris and I have talked a bunch on the podcast about games that could do with a bit of polish a la Jaws: Retro Edition from Limited Run Games. Top Gun is a prime candidate in my opinion as, if we are being honest, it really is painfully short at just 4 stages and has some quirks that most modern gamers would find simply unacceptable without the benefit of rose colored glasses. Access to modern control schemes with buttons for speed would be a massive improvement in the overall feel of the game and would alleviate many of the frustrations of the original.  

But I want to know what you think. Join the Stone Age Gamer discord, or you can find me on Bluesky to let me know your thoughts. In the immortal words of Billy Joel, “Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes, I'm afraid it's time for goodbye again.” See you soon.