The original Red Baron. I was only three at the time, but I still remember the hours I spent in my Fokker Dr.I triplane, blindly flying around in search of a big, juicy German zeplin . From there, I bought Jane's Fighters Anthology => Jane's Longbow Anthology => Jane's WWII Fighters => Jane's F-15 => Jane's F/A-18. I nearly had an anyeurism when I first heard that Jane's got shut down.

Aces Over Europe...

I was 8 in 1994 and in that first month I became the most advanced 8 year old World War 2 airwar historian.

Now I'm twenty and I basically teach my history classes.

Thank you Dynamix... you changed my life... oh wait, you're dead.

My first "sim" was a space shuttle simulator, made by Activision for the old Atari 2600, back in the early 80's. It felt state of the art at the time.

http://www.atariguide.com/0/044.htm

ZF

Mine was Topgun for the NES. But the first serious one was A/10 Cuba! Man, i was glued to the screen for over 2 years, that game was just right in every aspect for a serious(ly) fun sim.

F-15 Fighting Falcon.. it was a card for the Sega system. You could use each controller so I had a primative HOTAS....

F-117 Stealth by Microprose

Warbirds II - Which was my first WWII sim and where I saw my first virtual Redtail Mustang.

CFS 1
CFS 2
IL2 (and the rest is history)
CFS 3 (I think I can count on both hands all the times I played it.. by that time I was just smitten with IL2 so.... I think I got IL2 @ a week or two before CFS3 came out, I was waiting for CFS3 and figured since I upgraded for CFS 3 I might as well try this sim out that I couldnt run on my old rig..)

My first Flightsim for PC was Jane's F-15 close followed by Jane's ATF, USNF, USNF'97 and FA. I had almost every Jane's titles.

Great thread. SOme memories back here!

I think mine was the AH64 for the Amiga 500. Then, for PC, it was Strike Commander! I loved that game. 50MB install on my little 80MB hard drive! Even Windows was only about 10MB!
http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl...eCom.htm&h=186& w=250&sz=19&tbnid=gWcu5u7l32CdBM:&tbnh=78&tbnw=106&hl=en&start=7&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dstrike%2Bcommander%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DN

I can totally relate to that!! Gobsmacked!

Im glad somebody posted up a picture of the old flight sim 'Fighter pilot', because that (and the old flight sim by Psion 'Flight simulator' were the first 2 flight sims I ever purchased along with my trustly Zx Spectrum. Both of them for the day were amazing, lost count of the amount of time I practice ditching in Lake long in Flight simulator!

I think the WW2 game refered to was 'Night gunner' where you played rear gunner on a Lancaster bomber on raids over Germany. Not only could you hose down hapless Do217s making passes on your lanc, you could also control the aircraft during bombing attacks, and even carry out rocket attacks (pretty unusual lancaster!) on trains uboats and even airfields. I gather if you did 30 ops you had a go at the Dams raid, but I never got that far!

Digital integration (which did Fighter pilot and Night gunner) also did a rather nice attack helo sim called 'Tomahawk', based around the apache. Not quite as good as gunship, it had better flight dynamics and better wireframe graphics. Only thing that let it down was the bloody awful 'Lenslock'.

Gunship rocked. I can still remember the day I picked it up in 1986-7 and played it for the first time. It was evident to me even then that a new era in flight sims had started. F19 Stealth fighter that followed shortly after was the icing on the cake.

A, you bring back fond memories! You are completely right, it was Night Gunner that was the game that I had forgotten!

I also had the Psion Flight Simulator and DI:s Tomahawk game - which was a lot more advanced than Fighter Pilot if I remember it right! It had some kind of "landscape" as opposed to Fighter Pilot which was more like "green ground / blue sky"...

I remember looking at the loading screens thinking that "one day the games will be as good looking as those". Damn, we're getting old

/Mazex

Check out this thread in CH if you haven't already...
http://www.simhq.com/simhq3/sims/boards/bbs/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=142;t=003450
--


Mark

I started out with playing the original JetFighter 1.0 by Velocity, IIRC, it had the F-16, the F-18 and the F-14. I used to fly underneath the golden gate bridge and even some of the other, lower bridges in the bay area.

I loved being able to just fly around doing whatever, even carrier landings, all on the keyboard on a very new, very expensive 486 100mhz computer.

The other flight sim I played a lot was F-117A Nighthawk 1 and 2 by Microprose. That was a lot of fun and I think it was one of the first sims to really take advantage of soundblaster card technology. I remember staying up late nights dropping bombs over Tripoli in my stealth fighter.. Lots of fun!

Oh crap. I actually started out with a text based "flight sim" on the atari 800 I believe.

One of my students actually found it recently in one of my games history classes. It was basically in blue text with an ascii character bomber drawn on it. If I recally right, it was actually "multiplayer" in that multiple command turns could be used per station in the bomber (so I think about 4 of us played it taking parts, one guy as a radio operator, another gunner, other pilot and so on).

I've pretty much played every flight sim since then up until a few years ago. I guess I kind of got tired of the same old things people were doing in flight sims.

Good to see all those mentioned though, brings back memories

Ace of Aces on the c64.



and Fighter Bomber, a "realistic" Tornado sim:

I had a bunch of them for the TRS-80 CoCo, Atari 600XL & 800XL, and Commodore 64 that I had during the 80s. Don't remember too many names besides Super Huey, Strike Aces and F19 Stealth Fighter, but there were some Activision F14 sim, a few F16 sims.

Graduated to a PC in 1993 (486SX25, 1MB RAM, 80MB HD) and my first was either F15 Strike Eagle III or Falcon 3.0. Still have Falcon, both in the original 3.5" disk format (along with the Operation: Fighting Tiger, MiG-29, and Hornet expansion disks) and the Falcon Gold CD-ROM.

What an ultracool topic!

Here's mine ....

"Falcon 3.0" -- Spectrum HoloByte

The standard bearer.


Later!

My first sim was Gunship on C64. I bought the tape version first, it took half on hour before it loaded and you could take off!!! I suppose it gave you time to read the manual. Then i splashed out on a disk drive and bought the disc version.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.00 on a 8088 PC
Its interesting to see how far we are now from that...

Also I remember that it(FS1) came with a huge printed manual even though it was a single density 5 1/4" diskette, flimsy unrealible things BTW. And the computer had several thick manuals and many boxes and lots of stuff, not to mention the price. I do remember that it was like buying something from NASA. I recall the excitment of seeing that dos prompt and typing DIR, I know how lame that sounds but in those ancient times computers where something from SF, damn Im old.

Don't really remember what my first first flight sim was, but I have good memories of the following:

F15 Strike Eagle III
Red Baron
Aces over Europe
1942: Pacific Air War

All on my 486SX/66 (on my C64 I only played pitfall, river raid and the like).

They were truly excellent games. I haven't found a flight sim that holds me the same way that these did (EAW did, for a while). There was just something about them that todays sims lack (mainly they didn't seem like work, engine management consisted of hitting the + and - keys, or 0-9, etc). Good times.