Sonic Fighter

Released in June 1970. While not a video game, electro-mechanical games like this could be seen as early influences for video shoot'em ups, including Sega's After Burner.

Engineer Jack Pearson explained how the game was built and worked:

"What you did was you went to a local hobby shop and bought a 3D model of an airplane or whatever you wanted to shoot down and you painted up this model and took 35mm slides from all different angles and then built a projector. We’d go out and buy a projector lamp and build a mechanism for it ourselves and buy a lens. Then we'd have the projector mounted on a mechanism that we could move. So when we wanted to send an airplane across a screen, we’d turn this motor which would drive the projector and then turn the lamp on and it would show that picture going across the screen."

"You had a little PC [printed circuit] board that had contacts on it and a wiper blade and as the projector moved, the wiper blade would move to different contacts on the projector. The gun would have the same kind of mechanism. So if the projector was on pin 2 and the gun was on pin 2 and the trigger was pulled, you’d get a [closed] circuit. Then we’d have a solenoid that would pull another slide in front of the projector with a picture of a red explosion. So the explosion would move the same way the airplane would have. It was difficult because you had to make everything yourself - the projectors, the guns and so forth."