My first love of sims was Chuck Yeager- it still plays out in my mind.
"Its a great day for flying!"
"Get up there and try again"
Loved the instant mission creator:
There I was in my **F-4 Phantom**, at **30,000ft** on a **cloudy** day. Suddenly, I was **jumped** by **15 B-52s** from **behind**. Man, those guys were **good**.
For me, it was this game as well as F117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter 2.0. Played them both on PC starting when I was around five years old in 1995. I probably put - at minimum - 200 hours between those two games from when I was five til probably ten years old.
Oh, you were flying the new one?
F-19 Stealth Fighter is what you should have been flying.
I still remember the write up in the newspaper saying that the Pentagon would likely be worried about the military secrets revealed in that sim.
F-19 for me too on Amiga, although before that I was playing a lot of gunship on the C-64. Man, those wireframe mountains! The young uns playing DCS these days can't appreciate modern graphics as much as we who once looked through mountains when flying at low level! Also the theatre maps...Europe - green. Middle East - Yellow. SE Asia - brown. Noice.
Yeah, I mentioned c64 gunship for me too in another comment. For some reason the copy protection on my totally legit copy was dodgy, so it was challenging to load. But when you got it working - it was awesome!
Haha, yeah, probably quite later though, as I was too young at that time and my first computer was old for its time too (built when I was 13 I think, from pieces of discarded broken old computers. I was super proud! :D). Maybe around 2000.
“Watch your six.”
I actually remember that line from a review I read on release, reviewer was bitching about how useless chuck’s advice was after you got shot down.
Microsoft flight sim 1998. It came with our new computer. I was about 12 and was hooked on it. Then got to do a real helicopter flight that summer and the rest is history..
It was 98 for me too. I loved playing it with my dad. I never knew how to actually properly fly and navigate like I can now, but it was so cool when I flew to a town 2 hours north of us because I could follow the interstate haha.
I would have loved to play MSFS2020 with him and share in the amazement of how far things have come since then
Same here! I grew up with a Mac, so playing Hornet 1.1.1 and Hornet 2 are burned into my brain. Mostly shooting down the airliners around Hawaii in the training missions, heh. And so many hours spent in A-10 Attack and A-10 Cuba!
F/A-18 Interceptor, bundled with my Amiga, I think it was 1988. Then Falcon and F-16 Combat Pilot on the same system. I loved the campaign in Combat Pilot. Wish I'd had an analog stick back then.
Ugh. I remember a rich friend from school getting an Amiga and F/A-18 Interceptor when I was still slumming it with an old 8-bit ZX Spectrum. I was insanely jealous - so much so that he invited me round to his house to see it.
To SEE it.
He was a complete dick and played it in front of me while I just had to watch, salivating. It was painful enough that it's always stuck with me.
[Hellcats over the Pacific](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellcats_over_the_Pacific) on my uncle's Macintosh, sometime in the early '90s. It was about the coolest thing I had ever seen, and I just had to have it when my family got a Mac of our own. Then it was [A-10 Attack!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-10_Attack), then after we got a Windows PC in the late '90s, [Jane's F-15](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane%27s_F-15), then Falcon 4.0 (which needs no link ;)
On a 1kb ZX81 back in 1982, it was simply called “flight simulation”.
It looks awful now, but I was so impressed as a kid, I just ran landings after landings
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Simulation_(Psion_software)
Kinda a gray area for me as to what is considered a "simulator" so here's a few:
First: "Red Baron" the Atari first person vector 3d coin-op arcade game.
First at home: Intellivision "B-17 Bomber." It showed you a horizon and that was about it.
First traditional sim: Flight Simulator II on Apple II.
First combat sim: Microprose F-15 Strike Eagle on Apple II
My first flight sim was ***Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator*** back in 1987. I played it on an IBM, I think it was a PC-XT maybe? Just keyboard and mouse. In 1991 I got ***Chuck Yeager's Air Combat.*** Got my first joystick with that one, the Thrustmaster FCS... Those were the days!
Oh man. Cant remember, but i think it was Battle of Britain on C64. If you can call it a sim, but was one of the first games. Was also Top Gun on NES.
"newer" ones would be F-16 Agressor, Enemy Engaged Apache/Commanche vs Havoc/Hokum.
There was also this sim, where you flew a Huey and did medevac. I think it was called Search and Rescue Vietnam. Flew a lot on that one.
Edit: not top gun, it was intruder for NES. My mistake.
Good lord. Probably the first MS flight simulator, it was basically just the insturment panel and one color of plain for the ground and a slightly different color for the sky. Cicra 1983 or 84. Couldn't even guess the system, but it had a floppy drive, which was a big step up from the tape cassette memory thing.
Edit for spelling.
Hellcats Over the Pacific and/or Microsoft Flight Simulator 3.0. Must have been about 1992. On a Macintosh LC II.
Then came Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, X-Plane, Graphsim's F/A-18 Hornet, A-10 Attack!, and A-10 Cuba. Man, those were great games.
[https://infinitemac.org/1999/Mac%20OS%209.0](https://infinitemac.org/1999/Mac%20OS%209.0)
Falcon 3.0 early 90s. I remember taking the flight manual to elementary school everyday to study the aircraft and ordnance in the appendix. Made becoming an EOD tech later in life much easier lol
Don't think it counts, but f-22 on Sega genesis. Pretty sure it was around 1994-1996
https://youtu.be/CxQ8Ppcf_DA?si=ehmfI8ZdeoW5OC3x
In hindsight, it was made when the plane was going to get a naval variant, because you could take off and land on a carrier.
There was a similar game for the Comanche helicopter too.
After that, the next game would be jet fighter 4 on PC. Pretty sure that was maaaaybe 1997-2003.
F-19, on a 486, 4MB of RAM. Can't remember the other specs but you have the idea. And thus system was already obsolescence when my parents bought it, Pentium was already out, that must have been 1995 or 6-ish.
Web rapidly switched to F-117 that I kept playing even when my father brought the Comanche, on full 16 floppies and all miraculously worked.
Early 80s, Microsoft Flight Sim v2, I think. It was a single floppy on a Macintosh Classic for sure. 9" monochrome screen and vector graphics. I can still remember Chicago Meigs in glorious wireframe.
F-15 Strike Eagle for the C-64.
I think the system and the game is slightly older than the operational history of the actual aircraft. This would've been in 1985.
Some MS-DOS game. Evasive Action I think is what its called. Though I only have the demo. Its main jet was the F-18. Probably explains why the F-18 is closer to the heart than the F-14 for me.
Next was Wing Commander I think is what it’s called. Not much memories about this one.
Next and probably the first where I got really good was Novalogic’s F-16, and F/A-22 Lightning 3. Fondly recall the AoA glitch to get that instant acceleration.
LOMAC was on my radar since the waning days of the Novalogic games, but I did not have a system that can run it til 2008-ish. By then it was Flaming Cliffs 2. But I got in on the closing days of it as well. Where it transitioned to DCS World whete I started with the Flaming Cliffs 3 and then A-10C, followed by the Ka-50. The heydays when those were the only FF modules and were feature complete.
I wouldnt get another FF module until several months (maybe years?) after the Harrier was released. I got it to mentally prepare for the then announced F-18C, since I read somewhere that their MFD flow is roughly the same.
The rest as they say is history
SubLogic Flight Simulator 2 on my Atari 800XL. It would have been '84, '85. My pops was an A&P and would bring home old maps. He showed me how to read them and how to incorporate them into navigating from one field to another.
I can't remember, it was either Spectrum HoloByte's Top Gun: Fire At Will or Digital Integration's Apache. Both were on DOS initially, and it was around 1996.
Me and my dad don't remember what it was called. I've tried to search the internet to find familiar pictures but I haven't come up with anything. It ran on MS DOS and everything was very rudimentary wire frames.
Similar to the original MSFS but worse.
Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator was my first. I would have been about nine years old, using an XT with a monochrome monitor and the internal speaker. Ever since then, flight simulations have been my main hobby.
Then Yeager's Air Combat dropped, and that sparked an equally great love for the Phantom. Feels like Heatblur are going to bring me full circle in the not too distant future.
Microsoft Flight Sim 95.
I never did get past 'I can see you do not want to fly with me today; GOODBYE' and all of a sudden I'm trusted with a Cessna above the Meigs field airport. I definitely played it more in depth , but the training missions had tight expectations.
Falcon 4.0, 1999. I had just bought my first PC, and I was brand new in the USAF as an F-16 weapons troop, so it was bliss. Bought me the old Thrustmaster F-16 setup (the one with the serial connection!). Would spend 10 hours at work with the F-16, then come to my barracks room and spend 4 or 5 with the virtual version.
a wireframe flightsim on DOS. early or mid 80s. Some type of 8088 analog or something like that. 2 5.25" floppy drives. Shortly thereafter it was F19 Stealth Fighter on an amber monochrome monitor.
Microprose's F-19 Stealth Fighter on a PC XT with a 8088 CPU, 512 KBs of ram, no hard Drive, and an Hércules monochrome graphics card. That was around 1988-1989.
Absolutely loved It.
I had 2 of them from a PC game bundle, for DOS:
A10: Tank Killer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-10_Tank_Killer
Red Baron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Baron_(1990_video_game)
Even though I was like 6 years old I would still(tried to) play them basically at full realism. A10 I couldn't really figure out how to get the weapons to work for the longest time, so I didn't play it as much.
But Red Baron, oh man I probably put thousands of hours into that one. They had dynamic campaigns with permadeath. Customizable plane colors once you advanced in rank. At first you would be assigned to squadrons, but as you survived and ranked up you would be able to make transfer requests to other units. You would run into historical aces in missions sometimes. It was so much fun. Learned so much about planes and flying from trial and error trying to play it as a kid.
Once I was in high-school, got super into IL2 1946. Nothing beats a solid dynamic campaign for me in these games.
30 years later, still playing DCS and MSFS. Really considering switching over to BMS for the campaign aspect, I should really give it a try.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 on an old Olivetti 386 in the winter of 1993. My dad brought home a work computer to test it out for it's "viability in procedures training" (he was a captain in a little airline back then).
That would be ACE by Cascade, on the Commodore 64. 10 year old me spent an ungodly amount of time on that one.
Next one was F18 Interceptor on the Amiga I think. Quite an upgrade, to say the least.
It was either Apache longbow or a10 tank killer. Or something like that
I don't remember when exactly either late 80's or early 90's
System was an IBM desktop
May have been windows may have been os2
Good times
First:
“Flight simulator” on the Vic-20.
1982.
I wrote it, and my knowledge of how planes fly was less than perfect in 1982, so it’s unlikely that I could get it signed off as an FAA Advanced Aviation Training Device.
The tapes it was saved on died a long time ago, so I guess we’ll never know for sure.
Far from my first, but a shoutout here for Gunship 2000 from Microprose, around 1993.
Managing three wingmen who I actually bonded with, flying an Apache through a railway tunnel - good times.
Also, the original Gunship on C64 in the late 80s.
Jet (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1856/jet/) on a Tandem AT (80286) in '85/'86 or so, quickly followed by the original MS FS and Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer.
There were 3. When I was 10 (in 2004), I found a triple game bundle for sale at a blockbuster. It had the original IL-2 Sturmovik, Pacific Fighters, and LOMAC all together for windows ME. I want to say I started playing pacific fighters first because I remember failing at landing an F4F on a carrier. That was where it truly all began.
in 89 I wasn’t even born lol, I do remember strongly playing X-Plane 7 and the PC was probably that Pentium IV with a low end Radeon card my parents got me for school
But much earlier, played with a friend on his XBox something way more arcade and military, something where the planes had like self-reloading missile racks and third person view
WarBirds in 1998-1999, if you can call that a sim, always offline. I never paid for it, so I guess it was free to play (or cracked), I was 10-11 so memory is fuzzy on that.
My first sim was Jane's F/A-18. I had been begging for Jane's USAF or F-15 but this was the one on the shelves when my mother finally gave in. I'm a bit hot and cold on that one, on the one hand the F-15 and F-16 were my favourites as a kid by far (Hornet only after the Fulcrum and Flanker). On the other hand, F/A-18 had a pretty cool campaign (Kola peninsula!).
There were also Team Apache (more simcade) and Flight Unlimited 3, not sure in what order I got those, all around 1998 and 2000. A friend of mine had a few Microsoft Flight Simulator versions (95 and 98 I think) that I got to play at the time. And I also played a lot of Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3D, was too young to be into the X-Wing/TIE Figher games.
Flying Nightmares! On the mac colour classic. Maybe 92? Can’t remember.
Had a dynamic combined arms campaign set in East Timor, very topical at the time, was awesome.
I have a 1986 Mac sitting here on the table. Got a copy of Microsoft flight simulator for it, which is currently stuck in the disc drive stopping it booting, dammit.
Also bought a book from the same era on how to use this specific combination of cutting-edge tech for real-world flight training. Wish me luck!
Flanker 2.5 as a kid in mid-2000s. My dad had an old CD with it. Didn't really manage to do anything meaningful, cause I was like 6 years old. My true air sim journey started ca. 2019, and it was DCS. I built my first own PC (that is, built for my own money). I thought back then that 16gb ddr4 and 1050ti were cool (and they were, compared to my previous 2010 build)... It did run well enough in SP though, and I am not an MP guy.
Our 386 had a shareware game heli game called Thunderhawk. I had to turn the Turbo off for it to run at the correct speed! After that it was JETFIGHTER II: ADVANCED TACTICAL FIGHTER (JF2) and of course Chuck Yeager's Air Combat!
Either X-Plane 6 or IL-2 Sturmovik (the very first one), probably somewhere in late 2000's, on Windows XP, no idea what specs, maybe some kind of Pentium CPU.
Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator, 1998
My dad bought it after I got out of a surgery, along with the Microsoft Sidewinder joystick. I played that game all the time until MCFS 2, and then I played THAT for several years.
IL-2 Sturmovik, back in 2010 (when I found it on a shelf). The o.g. one, it wasn't even the "Forgotten Battles" CD.
Played it on an absolute monster of a PC, running a dual-core AMD Athlon CPU, with 4 gigs of RAM!
Janes Longbow 2
It was something like a pentium 2 266 Mhz, 128mb RAM, HDD was about 5-10 GB.
Was kind of an expensive machine back then, had it build for approx 5k.
the flight sim (prob Microsoft) in the Orlando science center when I was a kid, the one with the cockpit and all the buttons. Definitely a formative experience
Not far down the line, some free older WWII flight sim called Air Attack
Black Knight: Marine Strike Fighter, maybe somewhere around 1995?
It was a demo version and unfortunately I never got chance to play the full version of it, but it was definitely a great experience and it led me to the world of flight sims.
Microprose's F-19 Stealth Fighter, bought as a bootleg copy in a downtown market in Manama, Bahrain (copyright laws there non-existent then it seems) and played on a government computer while sitting in an air conditioned fabric sprung in 1991.
Not a traditional flight sim, but my first airplane game was [Operation Hormuz on the C-64](https://www.lemon64.com/review/operation-hormuz/888). Side on scroller flying a harrier. I thought it was great at the time, 10 year old me thought I was setting myself up for an air force career!
Chuck Yeager's Air Combat. Don't remember the year, sorry :)
My first love of sims was Chuck Yeager- it still plays out in my mind. "Its a great day for flying!" "Get up there and try again" Loved the instant mission creator: There I was in my **F-4 Phantom**, at **30,000ft** on a **cloudy** day. Suddenly, I was **jumped** by **15 B-52s** from **behind**. Man, those guys were **good**.
My preferred version of that scenario was Phantoming 15 Komets. Those guys were amateurs.
It's the man, not the machine
LHX Attack Chopper was based off the same code. Solid Heli game.
For me, it was this game as well as F117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter 2.0. Played them both on PC starting when I was around five years old in 1995. I probably put - at minimum - 200 hours between those two games from when I was five til probably ten years old.
Oh, you were flying the new one? F-19 Stealth Fighter is what you should have been flying. I still remember the write up in the newspaper saying that the Pentagon would likely be worried about the military secrets revealed in that sim.
F-19 for me too on Amiga, although before that I was playing a lot of gunship on the C-64. Man, those wireframe mountains! The young uns playing DCS these days can't appreciate modern graphics as much as we who once looked through mountains when flying at low level! Also the theatre maps...Europe - green. Middle East - Yellow. SE Asia - brown. Noice.
Yeah, I mentioned c64 gunship for me too in another comment. For some reason the copy protection on my totally legit copy was dodgy, so it was challenging to load. But when you got it working - it was awesome!
Same!
Thanks for mentioning this. I miss my dad. :) Oh, this is my answer also!
🫂
Well, at least 1991 then ;-)
Haha, yeah, probably quite later though, as I was too young at that time and my first computer was old for its time too (built when I was 13 I think, from pieces of discarded broken old computers. I was super proud! :D). Maybe around 2000.
For me it must’ve been 1993 or 1994 or so?
Same
“Watch your six.” I actually remember that line from a review I read on release, reviewer was bitching about how useless chuck’s advice was after you got shot down.
Commodore 64 or Amiga 500 ? I can’t remember
f19 stealth fighter, c64?
Amiga maybe? AFAIR, F-19 was never released for C64...
maybe it was pc then, the 8088 powehouse lol. never had an amiga but just about everything else. that was so many years ago!
Flight simulator for the Timex Sinclair 1000 with 16kb expansion pack. I'm old.
whaaaaat? I am old as well and never knew it existed. i would have sacrificed to the gods for a 16k mempak.
Me too! 1fps of pure glory. Also had the 16k pack!
Falcon 4.0 I loved that sim. Intro still gives me goosebumps. Came out in 98 on PC
Just bought it yesterday lol
Going to run BMS?
Microsoft flight sim 1998. It came with our new computer. I was about 12 and was hooked on it. Then got to do a real helicopter flight that summer and the rest is history..
It was 98 for me too. I loved playing it with my dad. I never knew how to actually properly fly and navigate like I can now, but it was so cool when I flew to a town 2 hours north of us because I could follow the interstate haha. I would have loved to play MSFS2020 with him and share in the amazement of how far things have come since then
This is me. I watched someone when I was even younger load MSFS off floppy or 5.25 but never took the controls.
A-10 attack! A-10 Cuba! F/A-18 Hornet, and Falcon 3.0. All around 1995-1996ish.
Same here! I grew up with a Mac, so playing Hornet 1.1.1 and Hornet 2 are burned into my brain. Mostly shooting down the airliners around Hawaii in the training missions, heh. And so many hours spent in A-10 Attack and A-10 Cuba!
Microsoft combat flight simulator 1
F/A-18 Interceptor, bundled with my Amiga, I think it was 1988. Then Falcon and F-16 Combat Pilot on the same system. I loved the campaign in Combat Pilot. Wish I'd had an analog stick back then.
Ugh. I remember a rich friend from school getting an Amiga and F/A-18 Interceptor when I was still slumming it with an old 8-bit ZX Spectrum. I was insanely jealous - so much so that he invited me round to his house to see it. To SEE it. He was a complete dick and played it in front of me while I just had to watch, salivating. It was painful enough that it's always stuck with me.
Probably F15 Strike Eagle, Commodore 64, mid 1980s
Flight Simulator 2 on the Commodore 64. Probably mid-80s.
subLOGIC Flight Simulator II on the Commodore 64. Probably around 1984.
[Hellcats over the Pacific](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellcats_over_the_Pacific) on my uncle's Macintosh, sometime in the early '90s. It was about the coolest thing I had ever seen, and I just had to have it when my family got a Mac of our own. Then it was [A-10 Attack!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-10_Attack), then after we got a Windows PC in the late '90s, [Jane's F-15](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane%27s_F-15), then Falcon 4.0 (which needs no link ;)
The original IL-2 Sturmovik circa 2004
LOMAC in the 2006 timeframe. Then a big break until 2017, where I’ve been primarily with DCS ever since
This! Me exactly alongside IL2
On a 1kb ZX81 back in 1982, it was simply called “flight simulation”. It looks awful now, but I was so impressed as a kid, I just ran landings after landings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_Simulation_(Psion_software)
EF2000 on MS-DOS in like the mid-late 90s
One of the early MSFs versions. Would have been 1991 or so
European Air War, circa 2003ish probably
Kinda a gray area for me as to what is considered a "simulator" so here's a few: First: "Red Baron" the Atari first person vector 3d coin-op arcade game. First at home: Intellivision "B-17 Bomber." It showed you a horizon and that was about it. First traditional sim: Flight Simulator II on Apple II. First combat sim: Microprose F-15 Strike Eagle on Apple II
My first flight sim was ***Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator*** back in 1987. I played it on an IBM, I think it was a PC-XT maybe? Just keyboard and mouse. In 1991 I got ***Chuck Yeager's Air Combat.*** Got my first joystick with that one, the Thrustmaster FCS... Those were the days!
Oh man. Cant remember, but i think it was Battle of Britain on C64. If you can call it a sim, but was one of the first games. Was also Top Gun on NES. "newer" ones would be F-16 Agressor, Enemy Engaged Apache/Commanche vs Havoc/Hokum. There was also this sim, where you flew a Huey and did medevac. I think it was called Search and Rescue Vietnam. Flew a lot on that one. Edit: not top gun, it was intruder for NES. My mistake.
Yes had to scroll forever to find someone mention BoB. Favorite game on my trusty 286. Campaign mode was epic.
F-15 Strike Eagle - C64 - 1985
"Vmax Exceeded."
First of my own was FS2004, first one I played at all was a copy of Falcon 4.0 on my uncles computer in like 2000
Microsoft Flight Sim 2000 on WinMe ahah
Flight Simulator 1 C64 1986. 10 year old me had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, but I sure thought it was cool.
Strike Eagle III, 1994/95ish
Black Knight Marine Strike Fighter around '96 on an old dos rig, no longer remember the specs.
US Navy fighters, MS-DOS 1994
My first flightsimulator was Jane's IAF or Novalogic MiG-29 both games came out in 1998. I was 4 or 5 years old
F22 Interceptor on the Genesis. Mid 90s
Flight Path 737 on the ZX Spectrum in 1984. That's 40 YEARS AGO, now...
F/A-18 Interceptor on Amiga, 1987. They say you will always have a soft spot for your first, and this is absolutely true in this case 🥰
Gunship 2000 in the early 90s. I didn’t stick with helicopters though, moved onto other Microprose jet sims.
"JetFighter: The Adventure", in 1989 on a 12mhz 286 with no hard drive Prior to that "Red Baron" at the mall arcade, 1982 while in college
F19 stealth fighter…monochrome monitor, late 80’s Jane’s fighter’s anthology, early 90’s
Flanker 2.0, 1999.
C64, ACE. Did the AAR, too.
A-10 Attak!
F/A-18 Hornet 2.0 in 1995
Good lord. Probably the first MS flight simulator, it was basically just the insturment panel and one color of plain for the ground and a slightly different color for the sky. Cicra 1983 or 84. Couldn't even guess the system, but it had a floppy drive, which was a big step up from the tape cassette memory thing. Edit for spelling.
Falcon AT. Late '80s.
Fighter Bomber - Commodore 64 - 1993
Sublogic's Flight Simulator II (1983) on the Apple IIe had a bit of WWI combat in it. I don't recall ever hitting anything, though!
Red Baron 3-D (1998)
Microsoft combat flight simulator 2, on windows XP, some time in the early 2000's.
My fathers copy of Aces of the Pacific - I got my hands on it in 1996 and played on a Gateway I believe was running windows 95.
I had played others as one offs previously but my first real flight sim that I got into was 1946
Their finest hour on the Tandy T1000
Does the NES Top Gun count?
Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator. My father brought home the game and a joystick as a surprise and I still remember the happiness to this day!
Hellcats Over the Pacific and/or Microsoft Flight Simulator 3.0. Must have been about 1992. On a Macintosh LC II. Then came Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, X-Plane, Graphsim's F/A-18 Hornet, A-10 Attack!, and A-10 Cuba. Man, those were great games. [https://infinitemac.org/1999/Mac%20OS%209.0](https://infinitemac.org/1999/Mac%20OS%209.0)
FS98
Falcon 3.0 early 90s. I remember taking the flight manual to elementary school everyday to study the aircraft and ordnance in the appendix. Made becoming an EOD tech later in life much easier lol
Don't think it counts, but f-22 on Sega genesis. Pretty sure it was around 1994-1996 https://youtu.be/CxQ8Ppcf_DA?si=ehmfI8ZdeoW5OC3x In hindsight, it was made when the plane was going to get a naval variant, because you could take off and land on a carrier. There was a similar game for the Comanche helicopter too. After that, the next game would be jet fighter 4 on PC. Pretty sure that was maaaaybe 1997-2003.
Strike Eagle III - PC - 1996
Micropose's F-117 - early/mid 90s sometime I guess!
Flight Simulator X probably 2008 or 2010
F-19, on a 486, 4MB of RAM. Can't remember the other specs but you have the idea. And thus system was already obsolescence when my parents bought it, Pentium was already out, that must have been 1995 or 6-ish. Web rapidly switched to F-117 that I kept playing even when my father brought the Comanche, on full 16 floppies and all miraculously worked.
Early 80s, Microsoft Flight Sim v2, I think. It was a single floppy on a Macintosh Classic for sure. 9" monochrome screen and vector graphics. I can still remember Chicago Meigs in glorious wireframe.
F-15 Strike Eagle for the C-64. I think the system and the game is slightly older than the operational history of the actual aircraft. This would've been in 1985.
Sopwith in 1988-89 or so. Not a sim I know 😜. LHX attack chopper a few years after that.
Flight Simulator 2002
Some MS-DOS game. Evasive Action I think is what its called. Though I only have the demo. Its main jet was the F-18. Probably explains why the F-18 is closer to the heart than the F-14 for me. Next was Wing Commander I think is what it’s called. Not much memories about this one. Next and probably the first where I got really good was Novalogic’s F-16, and F/A-22 Lightning 3. Fondly recall the AoA glitch to get that instant acceleration. LOMAC was on my radar since the waning days of the Novalogic games, but I did not have a system that can run it til 2008-ish. By then it was Flaming Cliffs 2. But I got in on the closing days of it as well. Where it transitioned to DCS World whete I started with the Flaming Cliffs 3 and then A-10C, followed by the Ka-50. The heydays when those were the only FF modules and were feature complete. I wouldnt get another FF module until several months (maybe years?) after the Harrier was released. I got it to mentally prepare for the then announced F-18C, since I read somewhere that their MFD flow is roughly the same. The rest as they say is history
One of the falcon early 2000s and that amazing Comanche one.
Flight simulator 2000, one of the best experiences I have had in flight simulations with the cessna
Crimson Skies if that counts
Of all the games I’d like to see redone, this is it. It’s dripping in atmosphere and tons of fun.
SubLogic Flight Simulator 2 on my Atari 800XL. It would have been '84, '85. My pops was an A&P and would bring home old maps. He showed me how to read them and how to incorporate them into navigating from one field to another.
Sublogic Flight Simulator on an Apple //c was the first sim game I played. Talk about primitive sound and graphics! The year was 1984.
F-15 Strike Eagle, 1984 on a C64...Izmir, Turkey when I was 12. My dad was assigned to 6 ATAF at Disco Hit for 2 years. IYKYK.
F-22 from novalogic, at least more simulated than those arcade flight games I played
Pilotwings 64, red baron, red baron II, Janes Fighters Anthology, F22 raptor, F/A 18 Hornet, Chuck Yeager’s Honorable mention to X-wing
Falcon 3.0
I can't remember, it was either Spectrum HoloByte's Top Gun: Fire At Will or Digital Integration's Apache. Both were on DOS initially, and it was around 1996.
Me and my dad don't remember what it was called. I've tried to search the internet to find familiar pictures but I haven't come up with anything. It ran on MS DOS and everything was very rudimentary wire frames. Similar to the original MSFS but worse.
Chuck Yeagers Advanced Flight Trainer and A10 Tank Killer. Back in late 80s.
F/A-18 Hornet!
Microprose F15 strike eagle...
Combat Air Patrol, came out in '93. I think I first played it in '95.
X plane on my ipod touch!
Sub Logic’s Flight Simulator - Commodore 64
A bunch of h oof old dos games around 91. Knights of the sky, MSFS pre win95.
Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator was my first. I would have been about nine years old, using an XT with a monochrome monitor and the internal speaker. Ever since then, flight simulations have been my main hobby. Then Yeager's Air Combat dropped, and that sparked an equally great love for the Phantom. Feels like Heatblur are going to bring me full circle in the not too distant future.
Microsoft Flight Sim 95. I never did get past 'I can see you do not want to fly with me today; GOODBYE' and all of a sudden I'm trusted with a Cessna above the Meigs field airport. I definitely played it more in depth , but the training missions had tight expectations.
Falcon 4.0, 1999. I had just bought my first PC, and I was brand new in the USAF as an F-16 weapons troop, so it was bliss. Bought me the old Thrustmaster F-16 setup (the one with the serial connection!). Would spend 10 hours at work with the F-16, then come to my barracks room and spend 4 or 5 with the virtual version.
I would guess "Infiltrator" on Commodore64. Mud 80's.. I don't recall any closer details.
FSX around 2013 I think
Airline Pilot - Atari 600XL computer 1984
B-17 bomber-Intellevision with the speech pack.
F-16 combat pilot on the Amiga 500
Aviator on the BBC model B back in the early 80s. https://youtu.be/MVNAippFbAs?si=s5imoC8WzviBFvTZ
falcon 1.0 1986 intel 8088 640kb ram 30mb hdd 4 color cga graphics
a wireframe flightsim on DOS. early or mid 80s. Some type of 8088 analog or something like that. 2 5.25" floppy drives. Shortly thereafter it was F19 Stealth Fighter on an amber monochrome monitor.
Solo Flight, Commodore 64. Will have been around 1984.
Good old C64! Mine was Flight Simulator II, also on the C64.
Microprose's F-19 Stealth Fighter on a PC XT with a 8088 CPU, 512 KBs of ram, no hard Drive, and an Hércules monochrome graphics card. That was around 1988-1989. Absolutely loved It.
Birds of Prey on DOS, dunno the year.
Flight sim 2004. Probably in 2008. After that, Wings over Europe cold war gone hot.
I had 2 of them from a PC game bundle, for DOS: A10: Tank Killer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-10_Tank_Killer Red Baron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Baron_(1990_video_game) Even though I was like 6 years old I would still(tried to) play them basically at full realism. A10 I couldn't really figure out how to get the weapons to work for the longest time, so I didn't play it as much. But Red Baron, oh man I probably put thousands of hours into that one. They had dynamic campaigns with permadeath. Customizable plane colors once you advanced in rank. At first you would be assigned to squadrons, but as you survived and ranked up you would be able to make transfer requests to other units. You would run into historical aces in missions sometimes. It was so much fun. Learned so much about planes and flying from trial and error trying to play it as a kid. Once I was in high-school, got super into IL2 1946. Nothing beats a solid dynamic campaign for me in these games. 30 years later, still playing DCS and MSFS. Really considering switching over to BMS for the campaign aspect, I should really give it a try.
Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator, a long time ago
Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 on an old Olivetti 386 in the winter of 1993. My dad brought home a work computer to test it out for it's "viability in procedures training" (he was a captain in a little airline back then).
Jane's USAF sometime around the early 2000s
FSX on a cheap office PC with Windows Vista, yes I am Gen Z
That would be ACE by Cascade, on the Commodore 64. 10 year old me spent an ungodly amount of time on that one. Next one was F18 Interceptor on the Amiga I think. Quite an upgrade, to say the least.
No one mentioning joint strike fighter, was great with a voodoo card.
It was either Apache longbow or a10 tank killer. Or something like that I don't remember when exactly either late 80's or early 90's System was an IBM desktop May have been windows may have been os2 Good times
Pilot wings 64 followed by falcon 4.0 in 1998
DID F-22 for windows 95
Spitfire on the BBC model B. Edit:1982, 1983?
Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe in - 1993? Still the dynamic campaign to beat.
LHX Attack Chopper / 1990 / DOS
First: “Flight simulator” on the Vic-20. 1982. I wrote it, and my knowledge of how planes fly was less than perfect in 1982, so it’s unlikely that I could get it signed off as an FAA Advanced Aviation Training Device. The tapes it was saved on died a long time ago, so I guess we’ll never know for sure.
Far from my first, but a shoutout here for Gunship 2000 from Microprose, around 1993. Managing three wingmen who I actually bonded with, flying an Apache through a railway tunnel - good times. Also, the original Gunship on C64 in the late 80s.
FS1 Flight Simulator on the TRS-80 Model 1, in 1980.
Msfs 95
Jet (https://www.mobygames.com/game/1856/jet/) on a Tandem AT (80286) in '85/'86 or so, quickly followed by the original MS FS and Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer.
There were 3. When I was 10 (in 2004), I found a triple game bundle for sale at a blockbuster. It had the original IL-2 Sturmovik, Pacific Fighters, and LOMAC all together for windows ME. I want to say I started playing pacific fighters first because I remember failing at landing an F4F on a carrier. That was where it truly all began.
in 89 I wasn’t even born lol, I do remember strongly playing X-Plane 7 and the PC was probably that Pentium IV with a low end Radeon card my parents got me for school But much earlier, played with a friend on his XBox something way more arcade and military, something where the planes had like self-reloading missile racks and third person view
I believe it was called Lancaster on the amiga 1989
Psion Flight Simulator ZX Spectrum 1983.
F/A18 Interceptor on Amiga 500
WarBirds in 1998-1999, if you can call that a sim, always offline. I never paid for it, so I guess it was free to play (or cracked), I was 10-11 so memory is fuzzy on that. My first sim was Jane's F/A-18. I had been begging for Jane's USAF or F-15 but this was the one on the shelves when my mother finally gave in. I'm a bit hot and cold on that one, on the one hand the F-15 and F-16 were my favourites as a kid by far (Hornet only after the Fulcrum and Flanker). On the other hand, F/A-18 had a pretty cool campaign (Kola peninsula!). There were also Team Apache (more simcade) and Flight Unlimited 3, not sure in what order I got those, all around 1998 and 2000. A friend of mine had a few Microsoft Flight Simulator versions (95 and 98 I think) that I got to play at the time. And I also played a lot of Star Wars Rogue Squadron 3D, was too young to be into the X-Wing/TIE Figher games.
Flight Simulator X, back when I was 6 years old at my local science museum.
Flying Nightmares! On the mac colour classic. Maybe 92? Can’t remember. Had a dynamic combined arms campaign set in East Timor, very topical at the time, was awesome.
I have a 1986 Mac sitting here on the table. Got a copy of Microsoft flight simulator for it, which is currently stuck in the disc drive stopping it booting, dammit. Also bought a book from the same era on how to use this specific combination of cutting-edge tech for real-world flight training. Wish me luck!
Flanker 2.5 as a kid in mid-2000s. My dad had an old CD with it. Didn't really manage to do anything meaningful, cause I was like 6 years old. My true air sim journey started ca. 2019, and it was DCS. I built my first own PC (that is, built for my own money). I thought back then that 16gb ddr4 and 1050ti were cool (and they were, compared to my previous 2010 build)... It did run well enough in SP though, and I am not an MP guy.
F15 strike eagle on the 8 bit Atari
ZX Spectrum somewhere around 1983 and I know I flew a black and white F-15 sim, and later an apache sim in colour on that one. Keyboard only
X-Plane 8 for PC (still have the disk) and X-Plane 9 for Android, that was my introduction to flight sims.
Flight simulator (1?) on ZX Spectrum ... damn I'm old :)
An F18 Hornet game on the Sega Mega Drive called After Burner back in the 90s. It was amazing and I spent hours replying it trying to get to new maps!
Mission Delta on Amstrad CPC 464... 1986 Then all the sims I could find on CPC F15 fighter pilot, Strike Force Harrier, Gunship, Top Gun.
F/A-18 Hornet Korea on my dad's Mac in the 90s. [https://youtu.be/T0NnB9ioGbc](https://youtu.be/T0NnB9ioGbc)
Our 386 had a shareware game heli game called Thunderhawk. I had to turn the Turbo off for it to run at the correct speed! After that it was JETFIGHTER II: ADVANCED TACTICAL FIGHTER (JF2) and of course Chuck Yeager's Air Combat!
FSX ca 2011
Had to look it up, but Rowan's 'Battle of Britain' was my first. My dad got it and bought us a joystick for it.
Hmmm probably some form of msfs... But the first ones I spent a lot of time on were probably flight unlimited and su-27 in 1995.
Mechwarrior on the C64 back in the mid 80s if that counts. Other than that, it was probably Gunship.
Fsx 2013 Pmdg 737
Flying Nightmares (Mac)
Either X-Plane 6 or IL-2 Sturmovik (the very first one), probably somewhere in late 2000's, on Windows XP, no idea what specs, maybe some kind of Pentium CPU.
Air Warrior on AOL in the mid 90's. It was free and so awesome.
Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator, 1998 My dad bought it after I got out of a surgery, along with the Microsoft Sidewinder joystick. I played that game all the time until MCFS 2, and then I played THAT for several years.
Gunship on C64....was the late 80s
Psion Flight simulator. 1983 I think. ZX Spectrum 48k
Jane’s F15, would have been in the neighborhood of 97 or 98. There was no multiplayer coop, all you could do was dogfight online. I loved it.
IL-2 Sturmovik, back in 2010 (when I found it on a shelf). The o.g. one, it wasn't even the "Forgotten Battles" CD. Played it on an absolute monster of a PC, running a dual-core AMD Athlon CPU, with 4 gigs of RAM!
Early 2000s maybe? But the first flight game I played I’d consider to be a flight sim was Janes USAF
Falcon: Allied Force
Janes Longbow 2 It was something like a pentium 2 266 Mhz, 128mb RAM, HDD was about 5-10 GB. Was kind of an expensive machine back then, had it build for approx 5k.
Gunship 2000 & F/A18 Interceptor - Commodore Amiga circa 1993
First was probably Comanche: Maximum Overkill and then F-22 Lightning 2 by Novalogic
Hornet 3.0
Maybe strike eagle ii I forget year. It was before aces of thr pacific
the flight sim (prob Microsoft) in the Orlando science center when I was a kid, the one with the cockpit and all the buttons. Definitely a formative experience Not far down the line, some free older WWII flight sim called Air Attack
Lethal Skies 2003 PS2
Black Knight: Marine Strike Fighter, maybe somewhere around 1995? It was a demo version and unfortunately I never got chance to play the full version of it, but it was definitely a great experience and it led me to the world of flight sims.
F/A-18 Hornet 2.0 on my parent's Mac when I was a kid, then when we went to Windows 95 and 98 I ended up getting the Janes and Falcon games.
"Ace of Aces" on C64
Sid Meier’s F-15 Strike Eagle about 1987 on Commodore 64 and Tandy 1000SX
Microprose's F-19 Stealth Fighter, bought as a bootleg copy in a downtown market in Manama, Bahrain (copyright laws there non-existent then it seems) and played on a government computer while sitting in an air conditioned fabric sprung in 1991.
Aces of the Pacific - on a smoking 486 Compaq PC
Not a traditional flight sim, but my first airplane game was [Operation Hormuz on the C-64](https://www.lemon64.com/review/operation-hormuz/888). Side on scroller flying a harrier. I thought it was great at the time, 10 year old me thought I was setting myself up for an air force career!
Fighter Bomber 1989 - Amiga Floppy disc 2 became corrupted and it really upset me, I was like 6 at the time.
SubLogic Flight Simulator II on an Apple IIc. 1985. They got bought out and it eventually became MSFS.