Development
Jordan Weisman, series creator and creative director of Crimson Skies, has said of the game: "Our whole goal is to give the player the kind of role of being Errol Flynn in a 1930's, 1940's great pirate adventure film of the air." According to Weisman, the inspiration for the game came after he had done research on the early years of aviation; he wished to create a game about the era. Weisman and Dave McCoy came up with the concept of "combining the classic fantasies of pilots and pirates." They then created the series' backstory by proposing changes to the history of the United States that would allow the rise of air piracy.
Development on the game originally began for Virtual World Entertainment, and was changed to a PC game under the name "Corsairs!". This original project was shelved, however, prompting Weisman and others to create the board game Crimson Skies. When FASA later became a part of Microsoft, Weisman was given the opportunity to work on a new project; his choice was to restart production of the Crimson Skies PC game.
The original version of the game shipped with numerous technical problems, one of the most notorious was the tendency to delete the player's saved game files. Shortly after the game's release, Microsoft released Crimson Skies Update Version 1.01, a patch specifically designed to fix this problem. Microsoft later released Update Version 1.02 to address other issues, including multiplayer game stability and mission load times.
Recent ATI and Nvidia drivers do not support this game. As such it was only possible to play it in Software Rendering mode. Several fans tried to identify and find the causes of this problem, later gathering at the Nvidia forums, and asking the Nvidia for a fix. Nvidia did not show availability for this. The fanbase tried several paths to a solution, culminating in asking known game graphic modder Timeslip if he could devise a fix.
The unofficial patch is available at Timeslip's homepage, fixes the issue with current graphic drivers and improves the game in some aspects, such as allowing higher resolutions.
Read more about this topic: Crimson Skies (video Game)
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