Fighter Bomber

Fighter Bomber was developed in 1989 by Vektor Grafix and published by Accolade for the Commodore 64. The studio's name announces its speciality: Vektor Grafix concentrated on vector and polygon graphics, exactly what a flight simulator requires.

The game uses a first-person view and is designed for one player. Its core is the strike mission: rather than pure dogfighting, the emphasis falls on tasks against ground targets, which means navigating to the objective, setting up the run correctly and releasing the load on target.

On a Commodore 64 that was a demanding job. An eight-bit processor had to compute the aircraft's position and draw a scene of lines and surfaces at the same time, so frame rates ran low and the authors had to be frugal with every piece of landscape detail.

The late eighties were, however, a period when home computer simulators matured quickly. Players no longer wanted just to fly but to plan a sortie, choose a weapons load and live with the consequences of a botched attack run, and that shift towards planning is characteristic of 1989.

Accolade was a publisher that backed technically ambitious titles and was willing to sell them on eight-bit machines even as space there ran short. 1989 was late in the Commodore 64's life: sixteen-bit computers were on the market and demanding games were migrating to them. A conversion to the older machine therefore meant cutting back, while also opening the genre to players who had not bought a new computer.

To fly a mission yourself, OldGame.cz launches this simulator in the browser with nothing to configure.