Combat Flight Simulator - History

History

Prior to the rise of video games, Sega produced arcade games that resemble video games, but were in fact electro-mechanical games that used rear image projection in a manner similar to the ancient zoetrope to produce moving animations on a screen. One such electro-mechanical game by Sega was Jet Rocket, a flight simulator featuring cockpit controls that could move the player aircraft around a landscape displayed on a screen and shoot missiles onto targets that explode when hit. In 1975, Taito released an arcade video game simulator, Interceptor, an early first-person combat flight simulator that involved piloting a jet fighter, using an eight-way joystick to aim with a crosshair and shoot at enemy aircraft that move in formations of two and scale in size depending on their distance to the player.

The earliest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator (1982) had crude graphics, simple flight models – and a combat option, with "dog fighting" in a World War I Sopwith Camel. This feature was removed in the simulator after v4.0, though the Camel itself remained as one of the standard aircraft for some time. Shortly after Microsoft Flight Simulator was released for the 8-bit computer, Microsoft released "Jet". This simulator used simple filled wire frame graphics and a small generic battle space to allow players to fight MiGs in an F-18 or F-16. The five or six frames per second refresh rate was barely acceptable, but was the only thing available in the 8-bit market at the time.

One of the most successful early combat flight simulators was Sega's After Burner (1987). The early 2000s saw several rival publishers such as NovaLogic with titles like the Comanche Series that simulated helicopter combat and later Jane's WWII Fighters which had small features that the Microsoft titles lacked, such as more detailed visible damage. A breakthrough occurred when Namco launched Air Combat, for PlayStation 1, which would go on as the Ace Combat series. The series would continue with sequels for PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Although mass interest has waned in recent years the genre is still popular today with many titles specialising in certain types of aircraft or historical periods or wars with Microsoft remaining one of the market leaders. Microsoft currently has three combat flight simulators: Combat Flight Simulator WWII Europe Series, Combat Flight Simulator 2 WWII Pacific Theatre and Combat Flight Simulator 3: Battle for Europe. Ubisoft is now the leading publisher in the genre with the acclaimed IL-2 Sturmovik series,which some claim to be far more realistic than other games in the genre, the first of which was first released in 2001.