DragonStrike

DragonStrike, published in 1990 by Strategic Simulations, then the holder of the Dungeons & Dragons computer license, is one of the boldest experiments ever tried with that license: a flight simulator in which you sit not in a cockpit but on the back of a dragon.

The game is set in the Dragonlance world during the War of the Lance. As a Knight of Solamnia you fly combat missions against the dragonarmies of evil: shoot down enemy dragons, protect allies, destroy targets on the ground. The dogfighting is played straight — altitude, speed and attack angle all matter — but the weapons are pure fantasy: dragon breath, a knight's lance on a passing charge, magical items. And your mount is no aircraft; it is a comrade in arms with health and teeth of its own.

The RPG roots show in the campaign structure. Success promotes you through the knightly orders and earns you better dragons — bronze, then silver, then gold — along with harder assignments. That career loop is what holds the game together and gives individual missions their weight.

Technically, DragonStrike was ambitious for 1990: real three-dimensional terrain and free flight on a home computer. To modern eyes the picture is crude, the frame rate choppy and the controls demand patience — the first hour is training rather than fun. Push through it. The idea of a ridden dragon as a war machine has appeared in games only rarely since, and here it carries a weight that prettier, newer games have seldom matched.

If you want to try the dragon's saddle, the game runs on oldgame.cz right in the browser with nothing to install.