Michael Jordan in Flight

Year 1993, I've got a 486 at home with sixteen megabytes of RAM, and a friend brings over some floppy disks with a game that has the famous number 23 shining on the box. Michael Jordan in Flight. Back then, the name was enough for us.

It's a basketball game from Pacific Gameworks, released for MS-DOS. It's not a full season simulation or a management title — the focus is on playing on the court itself, on that feeling of soaring toward the hoop. The game builds on Jordan's name and image, quite literally: the package included filmed sequences with the live Jordan, which was something you saw for the first time in your life on a home computer in 1993. Digitized video in a PC game wasn't a given back then.

What struck me most was the attempt at 3D perspective at a time when most sports games stuck strictly to 2D side or top-down views. Pacific Gameworks went their own way — the camera is positioned differently, movement across the court feels more spatial than usual. Does it work? Partially. The controls require time to get used to, orientation on the court too, and the graphics definitely aren't what you remember through the romantic haze. But for 1993, it was a step forward, or at least a step in a different direction.

Jordan's name was at its peak — 1993 was his third consecutive title with Chicago. A licensed game with live footage of the star felt like a premium product, and it was priced accordingly. Today it's aged exactly where you'd expect: technically. Video sequences that amazed back then now look like blurry squares. The game engine did its job, but the basketball game genre has moved light-years ahead since then. NBA Live 95 came out two years later, and the romance was over.

Today you'll play it mainly out of curiosity or nostalgia. If you're interested in what a 3D sports game looked like at a time when nobody really knew how to do it yet, or if you want to see how digitized video made its way into gaming's mainstream, Michael Jordan in Flight is a living document of that era. The gaming experience itself is more modest — but that's true for plenty of games that sold on the box more than the content. And a box with Jordan sold brilliantly.