Where Have the Flight Sims Gone?
Last night, I watched the movie, "Flyboys," on DVD. It was a pretty typical war-movie, with a few twists on the otherwise usual formula. The air-combat scenes were pretty spectacular, taking advantage of modern CGI to create some pretty incredible fight scenes. And lots of them. I heartily recommend it to flight sim buffs.

The film centered around a group of pilots in the Lafayette Escadrille, a French air squadron composed of mainly American volunteers. The movie itself takes incredible liberties with history, having the characters fly planes (and fly against planes) that were not in combat at the time, and perform maneuvers those early fighters simply could not perform. But hey - it was very fun, and I enjoyed it (though my wife laughed at me as I groused audibly during the first combat scene about how the Fokker triplanes they were fighting didn't even EXIST at that time...)

Naturally, after seeing a movie like that, it made me want to hop into the virtual cockpit of a flight sim. And I immediately thought about how really dang scarce they are these days. Almost as rare as Fokker triplanes in 1916...

A few days ago, I re-discovered a more-than-a-decade-old copy of an issue of Computer Gaming World magazine, which had a dedicated flight simulation section, and a commentary on how Apache helicopter sims were popping up all over from various publishers at the time. My thought was, "Dang, I only wish that was still the case."

I miss flight sims. They were once a staple of computer gaming, and even drove hardware sales. They pushed the graphical and realism bar to new levels. Falcon 3 probably helped sell CPU's with math-coprocessors, as they allowed an even more realistic flight model based on a declassified version of an actual military sim project to be used. There was a thriving (but competitive) business for controllers that provided a more "realistic" throttle / stick / rudder experience for the flight sim crowd.

The hype surrounding the "stealth fighter" - once dubbed the F-19 by toymakers and later revealed as the Air Force's F-117 - translated to tremendous sales for a Microprose game of the same subject matter. Editors jokingly betted on how many flight sims covering a specific aircraft or subgenre would be published in a year. The next release of a particular flight sim franchise was an event.

And then, like the California Gold Rush, it all disappeared. Not quite overnight, but certainly quickly. By about 2002 or so, one of the most popular genres in computer gaming had almost entirely disappeared, fading from view alongside graphic adventure games and wargames and those really atrocious "FMV Games." Nowadays, aside from Microsoft Flight Simulator - a civilian aircraft simulator - what sims that to get released are more often of a trickle of releases from Eastern Europe that are as likely to be sold as direct downloads rather than ever appearing on store shelves.

Unfortunately, this is a genre where I really don't expect the indies to step in and fill the void like they have with adventure games and wargames. For one thing, there are technical and content requirements for a flight sim to even be competitive with anything done in the last decade which would be daunting for an "indie" team. But even more challenging is my personal viewpoint that there really isn't a whole lot further to take the genre.

I mean, really --- aside from improving the multiplayer experience and just getting better graphics --- where does the genre have left to go? I mean, even if I were given some incredible budget with a mandate to make the build the next World War II uber-sim that leaves IL2 Strmovik: 1946 in the dust, I'm really not sure what I could do with it.

Did flight sims hit their peak because they have have hit an evolutionary brick wall already? Would a lateral shift of some kind be enough to bring them off the back-burner of gaming?

Labels: Flight Sims

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 4:40 PM (Permalink)