Flight simulator games of the DOS era

Flight simulation is the genre where a game turns into a technical exercise. It split into two camps early on: study simulations that model instruments, radar and flight behaviour closely enough that the manual is not optional, and arcade-leaning air combat games that keep the aircraft but drop most of the systems behind it. Both are collected here, and the difference matters far more than the graphics — two titles from the same year can be five minutes or two hours apart in the time it takes to get off the runway.

On the PC side, MicroProse set the pattern. F-15 Strike Eagle (1985), designed by Sid Meier, simplified the cockpit aggressively while keeping the pressure of a mission, and became the template the studio reused for years. F-19 Stealth Fighter (1988) inverted the goal: the objective was to stay off enemy radar rather than win dogfights. It grew out of Project Stealth Fighter on the Commodore 64, and once the real aircraft was acknowledged publicly the idea was reissued as F-117A Stealth Fighter 2.0. Gunship 2000 moved the same approach to helicopters, B-17 Flying Fortress let you switch between the crew stations of a bomber, and Fleet Defender covered carrier operations in the F-14.

Historical simulation forms the second strand. Dynamix built Red Baron (1990) around First World War dogfights on the Western Front, with a career that tracked your kills and squadron postings; the studio later applied that career structure to the Second World War in Aces of the Pacific and Aces Over Europe. LucasArts came at the same war from the bomber stream: Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain and Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe both let you fly either side of a historical raid. Biplanes return in MicroProse's Knights of the Sky and Origin's Wings of Glory.

The demanding end of the collection is well populated. Falcon 3.0 from Spectrum HoloByte treated F-16 avionics and campaign planning as the actual content, and EF2000 and Su-27 Flanker ask for similar homework. NovaLogic went the other way with Comanche, whose voxel terrain engine produced canyons and ridgelines no polygon rival could match at the time, at the cost of a deliberately loose flight model. Strike Commander from Origin wrapped mercenary squadron drama around its flying, Flight Unlimited dropped weapons entirely in favour of aerobatics, and at the lightest end sit the side-view Sopwith and Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer, which is closer to a flying lesson than a war game.

Titles marked as playable run directly in the browser through an emulator, with no installation and no registration. A physical keyboard helps: these games assign functions across most of the keys, and the in-game key list is usually the first screen worth opening.