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I absolutely adore Kaneko's Aero Blasters / Air Buster. Released in arcades in 1990, I first saw it in a local public house and instantly fell in love with the bright, anime-style visuals and intense shmup action.
When I discovered it had been ported to the Mega Drive / Genesis a year later, I had to pick up a copy – and it didn't disappoint, supplying a faithful reproduction of the original coin-op, despite running on weaker hardware (long-standing readers of this site will have to forgive me for repeating myself here).
One aspect of the game that has always puzzled me, however, was the loading screen which appears when you start a game. Having moved over to the Mega Drive from an Atari ST a few years previously, I had quickly become used to the fact that cartridge-based systems didn't need lengthy load times – so why was Aero Blasters making me wait, even if it was only for a matter of seconds?
It seems I'm not alone in thinking this, as a post on social media regarding the 'intermission screen' has caught the attention of one of the people who worked on it.
"Izu" describes himself as "an independent developer who creates indie games as a hobby" via his company Pastel Orbit, but he reveals that Aero Blasters was one of his first projects in the industry.
Referring to the loading screen, Izu explains (translated via Google):
"It's been the butt of jokes since back then, huh? I get how the user feels. I'd probably think the same. Actually, there's this kind of backstory behind it. This is essentially a loading screen.
Due to all sorts of commercial reasons, even though it was being developed for an 8M cartridge back then, we were ordered to switch to 4M, so we went all out compressing the ROM data + decompressing it at runtime to cut down on mass-production costs."
There's another mystery explained that I perhaps didn't need explaining, but at least I don't feel quite as bad now when I'm waiting for the level to load.