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Holy shit, it's a Tie Fighter explosion from Star Wars?! Mind blown! (pun intended) Excellent find,
@coinopper!
The more I looked at that gif you made, the more sure I felt I've seen it before somewhere else, and not in a game. I immediately thought it was from Battlestar Galactica, but BG reused so many of the few s/x shots that were made, I quickly realized it wasn't from that. 80scoinops mentioned Firefox, so I looked through it, but there's only a few explosions in that, and none of them were it. I then went back to Star Wars and first thought it was from the speeder bike chase, but it wasn't. For a second I thought it might have been from the asteroids scene in Empire Strikes Back, and that's when the dogfight scene from the original came to me. What's odd about that scene is the first 3 Tie-Fighter explosions are basically in b&w and obscured by the ship's canopies, but that 4th one is so different - very colorful and huge. It's not a model blowing up like the ships in the Death Star trench. Using frameskip in YouTube ("," and "."), it goes from a frame of the ship to a frame showing a fireball. The background starfield also doesn't move at a constant rate. It's moving up quickly but the instant the explosion starts, it slows down and moves very slowly up. Near the end of the explosion, it stops moving, and right before it cuts back to Han Solo, it moves to the right

It's a terrific explosion, though, and very isolated as you mentioned, making it ideal to grab and reuse. Was it created by someone other than ILM? I doubt it. It looks like something Bruce Logan did. He's the ILM tech who did the Death Star and Alderaan explosions (he also worked on Firefox -
https://tinyurl.com/246psc2j). If I had to guess, the Tie-Fighter explosion was an 'outtake' of the Death Star explosion. It's possible Lucas was shown the Tie-Fighter explosion and he wanted more of a twinkling fireworks show explosion, which was more memorable:
Games like Gorf and Defender (and eventually Atari's Star Wars) certainly tried to recreate that effect, and the ending of Buck Rogers was a great variation of that.