SimHQ Contributor Scott “Elf” Elson shares stories what it was like during the “golden days” of flight simulation, and tells about working at Microprose and Jane’s Combat Simulations.

http://SimHQ.com/_commentary/all_047a.html

Awesome article. Quite a trip down memory lane. I remember all of those sims and the companies that developed them. I miss the hell out of those days, those companies, and those sims. What made them great then, and even better than the DCS sims today, was IMMERSION. Great, great immersion.

Love to see the facial hair on so many guys. Those were the days when REAL men had facial hair. I still do.

Loved every bit of the article! Janes F-15 & 18 are staples in my memory bank...and this was a nice nostalgia trip. The only problem is I couldn't stop reading it and I'm going to be carrying some sleep debt into work tomorrow!


Great read!

Great article, loved all the Jane's sims.

Recently got JF-15 running on my Win7 widescreen machine thanks to a thread here at SimHQ, great trip down memory lane, would love to see a proper update for the Jane's line for modern machines on GoG or similar.

The playability and immersion of those titles was immense, no need to do anything but squash some of the UI bugs which appear on modern DX versions, and tweak 'em to run on modern graphics cards.

How about it?

Great story one of those things i've always wanted to be part of.

I laughed at the part where you switched hands to fly. My son crosses his hands while playing FPS games lol.

Question
Do they pick people who are aviation friendly when picking the crew for a flight sim game or is it given to you?
I'd imagine you'd have to have interest in the topic....

That was a great read. Thank you for providing such a lengthy and detailed summary about your worklife back then. I do remember some heated discussions with CJ on comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.flight-sim about Janes F/A-18 back then. F-19 Stealth Fighter, Fleet Defender, F-15 and F/A-18 gave me many, many hours of quality entertainment, so thank you for that, too.

I'm glad you guys enjoyed it.

baltika,
EA owns that code so it would be up to them. Also most of my work was done with the AI and game play code so I'm not sure on what the potential issues are and how big of a pain UI and graphics changes would be.

Stormtrooper,
I think who gets picked depends on a lot of factors and would vary by company to company. The first question would be who's available to work on the project and what does skills does each person have. Another question would be how important is the game to the company. You might have someone who's really into flight sims but they might not have the skills the project needs or at least not at the level that the game might require. You could also have someone who's perfect for the project but is also the best person for another project the company has going which is a lot more important to the health of the company. Of course if a person is that useful to the company management is going to want to make sure that he's happy so he sticks around and that will be a factor as well. Sometimes compromises happen. There was a time I was promised I'd be on this one game but they really needed me to work on another so they let me do part time on each (and for a while it looked like there might be a third). In the end it's all a balancing act. If possible though you'd want to have people who are really into that type of game working on it. If not then it can turn into "just a job" and while you could still wind up with a good game I think there's a better chance of that if you have people on the team that really care about it. Even there you could run into a problem if people have different visions of what the game should be.

Elf

That brings back a lot of memories for me as well back in days of dial up BBS's. We had many a conversation with McConkey when F-15 III was the game of choice and really introduced me to multiplayer, even though it was over a modems with endless hours of changing modem strings. Ahh,...good times. It's there I met Wrecking Crew who as it turned out only lived 45 minutes from me at the time, a friendship that continues to this day. Those were the days when there was some really exciting content happening, not the eye candy improvements and never ending string of FPS's seen today. I'll not go into my disappointment with FD and Janes F-15 NOT having multiplayer but there was still some good times had. Nice flashback Scott.

Thanks for this write up, Elf. It brought back not only great memories flying all those amazing sims you guys made, but for me it also brought back a lot of memories of the people who made the sims possible and who I knew and flew with during that time frame in the mid 90s, especially in Warbirds. CJ, Wags, Sean Long (who became my wingman for several 2v2 tournaments over the years.) Joe "Quiz" Enzminger which I'm sure you met when you were talking to TK during Longbow IIs development, he was also from the development team of Warbirds. I remember during an E3 when Wild Bill took over he grabbed me and challenged me to a duel in the pods they had setup there, and kept bugging me about flying against him, he was so serious. I didn't realize at the time, but waxxing him in the duels would later give me the same satisfaction that I'm sure that guy felt punching his cardboard cutout face. It was defiantly a golden time, and golden people. Thanks for making our digital crack back then, It facilitated life long friendships and memories.

Drex

Very enjoyable read! Your hard work gave me many hours of fun flying in your virtual skies.

Thanks for writing the article elf!

ps When you were talking about working next to the mental health clinic...you were speaking in metaphor, right?-)

What a great read.

One simple word for all those involved: thanks.

You guys were responsible for me wasting some of the best years of my life.

Birdski,
Yeah, Jim is a good guy, though I haven't seen him in years. I completely understand your disappointment of not having co-op multiplayer in FD or JF-15 but there were tricks they could do for F-15 III that got a lot more problematic with the advances we made in certain parts of the later games as well as other limitations of the time. If you haven't seen the write up I did talking about why we didn't try to keep co-op multiplayer in for FD you might find it of interest. This is actually the same link to the old JF-15 Wiki entry that I reference in the article when talking about CJ and the power lines. Someone had also decided that my write up on this was worth including as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jane%27s_F-15&oldid=412094883 As I said though, I understand why you feel disappointed which is also why I'm glad I could finally get it in for JF/A-18.

Drex,
Your story reminded me of something I didn't put in the article. While we were working on FD Mike had been talking with a teacher who was doing all sorts of cool military related stuff at his school. They arranged for some of us to go head to head against some of their students, guns only. Well first off I should mention that I hadn't done much h2h in F-15 III. I went up against this one kid and I was pretty sure I had hit him a bunch of times but the plane still seemed to be flying so I kept firing at him. Finally a chat message came across asking me to quit firing, he was dead already and had been for a while. I had expect the plane to blow up or something and for some reason it took a really long time to fall/fly into the ground. I felt pretty bad about that since I know I wouldn't have enjoyed the constant bullet hits if the roles had been reversed.

piper,
Nope, not at all. I forget which hospital they were part of. It was OK when we moved into our real office but while we were in the temp office our doors were right next to each other. Also there was only one path to get to our door and their door was first so if you had even just a couple of guys outside smoking we'd have to squeeze past. Another smoking related store deals with my office. I was fortunate in that they let me have one of the corner offices so I had windows looking two directions. Unfortunately the window that you can in the picture of me working on my desk looked out to one of the mailboxes for the complex. It wasn't the people picking up their mail that was the issue. It was that there was a good sized roof over the area and so people used it as a place to smoke, particularly when it rained. After a few days of looking up and seeing people only a few feet away from my window looking into my office I decided to leave those blinds closed.

Dada257,
I'm sure all the guys I've worked with would join me in saying, "You're welcome." and that we're glad we could be of service. :-)


Heh, regarding facial hair I must admit I'm rather follicley challenged. I couldn't grow a beard if my life depended on it and what would develop if I tried to grow a mustache probably wouldn't be worth the effort.

Once again, I'm glad you all enjoyed it.

Elf

Thankyou.
That was a great read indeed.

I had forgotten how many countless hours I had sunk into some of those sims and nice to hear the stories of where they all came from.

I'm glad you are featured an article in SimHQ, well deserved for your dedication to both the sims and the community!

Great to know the wiki entries I made can still be accessed by "old revisions", I was sad when they removed them. For some reason, after I read the quotes on this forum in the F15 thread, I knew they were worth saving and sharing. I keep a copy in a txt file in my computer also, just in case, because I consider them priceless after playing JF15 for a whole campaign while keeping the Gulf-War book in my nightstand... jewels for any JF15 fan.

Congratulations, you are a hero!

Glad I've had today off as I've just spent all morning reading this excellent article from Scott, and re-living what I still regard as the glory days of flight simming. Nothing, in my opinion, has come close since then.

I well remember the excitement I felt when waiting for the latest from MicroProse and Jane's and the frustration when these sims slipped. It puts it into fine perspective when Scott writes of 100+ hour weeks worked for months to get these sims onto our desks. I certainly didn't appreciate it at the time but thankyou for that dedication. It certainly showed.

And just to let you know I have Jane's F-15, Longbow 2, and F/A-18 on the shelf in front of me as I write this. Still unparalleled as works of education and entertainment as far as I'm concerned. F-15 is working fine on my system but I still have to find the time to get the others going. Still such excellent sources of interesting information. And as for those manuals ....

Which reminds me. At that time I was working for the MoD and was having to do what amounted to mandatory overtime on saturdays to bring a new computer system up to speed. As management couldn't be bothered to come in to supervise, (they weren't going to let deadlines get in the way of THEIR weekends), I used to take those beautiful flight sim manuals into work to read up while waiting for that sh1te system to update. A much more productive use of my time!

So thanks Scott, thanks Jane's etc, and thanks Mod for paying me overtime to learn something interesting!!

Best regards,

Mike

It took me a while, but I lapped up every word from this article. I still get that "nugget feeling" even today when I listen to the intro video of JF-15. I loved JF-18, but have a soft spot for the Mudhen.

Scott, thanks for taking the time and sharing the magic with the rest of us; you guys created the stuff that dreams are made of. It is probably safe to bring F-15 II out now!

Thanks Scott.

II/JG77Hawk_5,
You're welcome. It's nice to hear how fondly the games are remembered even after this many years.

DonLduk,
Thanks for having posted those quotes, it saved me some legwork. Sometime I'll have to find where I had stored some of the posts I had kept my own copy of, particularly the one about the flight characteristics of the F-15E. As for being a hero, while I appreciate the thought, I think that term is best reserved for those that put themselves at risk for the sake of others. Thanks again and I'm honored that you felt the posts were worth saving.

miketb,
I'm glad we were able to help you make it through your own crunches and particularly glad to hear you got OT pay for it.

Warmbrak,
Heh, somehow I doubt that's going to happen but perhaps someone will create a game that matches or surpasses what JF-15 II could have been.

Elf

One thing I will say is that while other sims have sometimes been better in one way or another (graphics, flight modeling, systems modeling, etc), none ever matched the total quality of sims like FD and JF-15. For every "Falcon 4 does this better" or "DCS A-10 does this better" you can point out, you can find 3 things JF-15 or FD did better. Sure by modern standards they seem backwards, but for the day they achieved more.



The Jedi Master

That was great read indeed! Very interesting to see what went on "behind the scenes" of creating these wonderful sims we have so many fond and nostalgic memories of.
Thanks for sharing Elf :-)