F29 Retaliator

The year 1990, Sound Blaster had just hit the market, and I was sitting at my monitor with my hands on the keyboard trying not to flip my virtual fighter before I even got into the air. F29 Retaliator from Digital Image Design was exactly the kind of game that made you feel like you had something more than just a simple flight arcade in your hands.

It's a flight simulator set in a Cold War on the brink of thaw — you're flying in the cockpit of futuristic aircraft of American origin, and your main task is to survive encounters with Soviet fighters and bombers. Digital Image Design built the game around then merely hypothetical aircraft, so the "29" in the title wasn't about any real operational machine — it was a promise of technology that didn't yet stand on runways.

The game offers three basic modes. Zulu Alert is a training mode for those who want to get their hand in without risking an early career end — plenty of ammo, more enemies. Mission mode then works as a selection system where you choose what you want to accomplish. The actual flying feels simple by today's standards, but for 1990 it was a decent compromise between simulation and accessibility. The controls were manageable even without a joystick, though with one it was a different experience — and one decent speaker did wonders.

What set F29 Retaliator apart from the competition was the graphics and smooth movement. DID knew what it was doing with its 3D engine, and even on a 386 it looked convincing. Not realistic by today's standards, but convincing for its time — the horizon tilted the way it should, and air combat had momentum. It naturally aged in simulation depth: modern flight simulators are as far from this as the Moon is from Ruzyně Airport, but that wasn't F29's ambition anyway.

Today it'll appeal mainly to those who want to experience what flight action looked like before the era of Falcon 4.0 and DCS — no twenty-hour tutorials and no need to study the manual like it's before a final exam. Start it up, take off, fire away. If this offer sounds tempting to you and you're in the mood for a piece of game archaeology from a time when pixels on a monitor still smelled new, F29 Retaliator is good reason to pull out DOSBox.