Join The Club
The face of Ace Combat, Kazutoki Kono, has been working on the game series for a very long time. One of his earliest game credits is 1997's Ace Combat 2 for the PlayStation—he's worked his way up to the role of series brand director from his initial contributions to that game as part of the art team, making textures and bits of the UI. And yet in all that time, across the development of almost a dozen games about doing Top Gun-style stunts in machines that represent the pinnacle of human engineering, he's never once gotten to fly in one himself.
"Unfortunately over the last 30 years of my career I've been appealing, saying 'hey, we want to ride in one of these jets!' but we have not yet had the chance," Kono said in an interview with PC Gamer. "Neither myself, or anyone on the team."
Heartbreaking! How much could it cost to rent a decommissioned fighter jet for a weekend, anyway? Heck, it seems like you can buy a perfectly good one for five million bucks. Bandai Namco probably makes that much on Gunpla model sales every day. Put some of that money to work.
While the game publisher might prefer to avoid cozying up to the military to make their game a la the producers of Top Gun: Maverick, surely there's a way to let Ace Combat's developers experience the majesty of supersonic flight they've been doing their best to capture for all these years. I can't help but imagine Kono having his own Ford v Ferrari moment, where the CEO goes for a test drive and begins spontaneously weeping from the adrenaline. I'm sure I'd pass out before the jet pilot did a single barrel roll, but those first, like, 45 seconds would be amazing.
For Ace Combat 8, the developers have attempted to better convey the feeling of piloting a jet at more than 1,200 miles per hour. "Sound design was a huge part of Ace Combat 8—that oomph when you're crossing the sound barrier is something we pay a lot of attention to," he said. But to determine the difference in feel from one jet to another, the team is drawing on publicly available data like weight and thrust, rather than personal experience.
The Ace Combat team have, at least, gotten up close with some real aircraft, even if they haven't been able to take them for a ride. "We did have the opportunity to sit in the cockpit, so in my mind I was thinking 'all I have to do is push this lever and we're off,'" Kono said.
When I suggested that perhaps very, very good sales of Ace Combat 8 could convince Bandai Namco to buy the Ace Combat studio a jet for research purposes, he deadpanned an alternative idea:
"Well, maybe not for Bandai, but if they buy it for me, it could be my private jet."
Honestly, I can think of far worse wastes of money.
