It took very little time at all after Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first flights in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, for people to start asking how they might train new pilots in some more forgiving, less dangerous way than putting them behind the controls of a real airplane and hoping for the best. That said, the idea of flight simulation in general goes back a long, long way, almost all the way back to the dawn of powered flight itself. Until the 1980s, the вЂњbigвЂќ flight simulators made for training purposes were very different beasts from the ones that came later. To appreciate how this could be, we need to remember that the 3D-graphics techniques that were being used to power all flight simulators by the 1980s were a new technology at the time - new not just to microcomputers but to all computers.

In point of fact, though, the relationship between the two was more subtle - even more symbiotic - than one might guess. Many people assumed in the 1980s, as they still tend to do today, that the early microcomputer flight simulators were imperfect imitations of the bigger simulators that were used to train pilots for real-world flying. This article, while it may not quite give Microsoft Flight Simulator and its siblings their due, will at least begin to redress the balance.

(Let that sink in for a moment!)ДЄll of which is to say that a reckoning is long overdue here. Microsoft Flight Simulator, the prototypical and perennial product of its type, was the most commercially successful single franchise in all of computer gaming between 19 - all despite having no goals other than the ones you set for yourself and for the most part no guns either. In this latter sense, my efforts to date have been sadly inadequate in the case of flight simulators the harsh fact is that these games which IвЂ™ve neglected so completely were in fact among the most popular of their time, accounting on occasion for as much as 25 percent of the computer-game industryвЂ™s total revenue. But on the other hand, I want to sketch an accurate, non-anachronistic picture of these bygone eras of gaming as they really were. On the one hand, I want to celebrate the games that still stand up today, maybe even get some of you to try them for the first time all these years later - and IвЂ™ve yet to find a vintage flight simulator which I can recommend on those terms. The case of flight simulators thus serves to illustrate some of the natural tensions implicit in what I do here. Therefore they and the many games like them have appeared in these histories only in the form of passing mentions. Revisited today, however, all of those games strike me as absurdly, unplayably primitive. Growing up in the 1980s, I certainly wasnвЂ™t immune to the appeal of virtual flight I spent many hours with subLogicвЂ™s Flight Simulator II and MicroProseвЂ™s Gunship on my Commodore 64, then hours more with F/A-18 Interceptor on my Commodore Amiga. When we look back on them today, we find ourselves shaking our heads and asking what the heck we were all thinking. But they were perhaps the ones in which this requirement was most marked. No, they werenвЂ™t the only games that required a large helping of imagination to overlook their underwhelming audiovisuals, that had sometimes to ask their players to see them as what they aspired to be rather than what they actually were. It seems to me that vintage flight simulators have aged worse than just about any other genre of game. The same thing has obviously happened to flight simulators. As audio fidelity has gotten better and better, our standards have gotten higher and higher if we listen to a phonograph from 1910, it sounds horrible to our modern ears. They got the same enjoyment out of that Edison phonograph that we do out of high-fidelity. Clearly the standard that they had for audio fidelity back in 1910 was radically different from the standard we have. After EdisonвЂ™s original phonograph came out, people said that they could not detect a difference between a phonograph and a real performance.

Sublogic flight simulator assembly