Airfight

Last updated

Airfight is a 3D multiplayer flight simulation game and first-person shooter developed for the PLATO IV computer system in 1974. It was co-authored by Brand Fortner and Kevin Gorey at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign [1] [2] as one of the earliest recreational flight simulator programs as well as among the earliest remote networked, team-based games.

Contents

Gameplay

View of the game is presented from the first-person perspective inside of an aircraft cockpit, one of the earliest uses of a heads-up display in video games. The instruments provide necessary information on flight metrics like altitude, G-forces, roll, and pitch as well as a radar screen which displays the locations of enemy aircraft. The opposing teams aim to destroy the enemy aircraft by striking them with missiles, which increases the score of both the team and individual players. The game provides messages if the player is in immediate danger, such as if the aircraft stalls.

At the start of a game of Airfight, a player is asked to select one of two competing teams – Circle Squadron or Triangle Squadron – or a non-combatant team to observe the fight (though they can still crash). Players then choose an aircraft modeled after real military jets including the MIG-21 and the Lockheed F-104. Each fighter possesses differing statistics dealing with weight, wing area, and maximum speed. The plane can be augmented with fuel and missiles commiserate to the available weight of the aircraft. Refueling requires landing safely at an airstrip.

Each user chooses a username – distinct from their PLATO login name – which is displayed when a player crashes or kills another player. Some usernames used by frequent Airfight players became particularly notorious for their skill, but there was no password to limit access to the name so it could be used by others. [2] Airfight also had in-game chat like other multiplayer PLATO games. [2]

The game was coded to run in “background” mode, which used spare clock cycles of the PLATO system to run the game. While the game operated in real-time, users at individual terminals had to use the NEXT key on PLATO to progress the action.

Development

Development of Airfight began after the creation of two prior first-person flight games on PLATO – Spasim by Jim Bowery and Airace by Silas Warner. Spasim was a space flight simulator which pioneered the use of 3D graphics on PLATO and featured up to 32 players competing in an arena-based first-person shooter. Airace was modeled after realistic flight simulators and featured no combat, instead tasking teams to race against each other. Brand Fortner, a physics major at Urbana-Champaign, was impressed by Airace and wanted to develop a combat game with the same realism. [1] [2]

Fortner programmed the game with fellow physics student Kevin Gorey in the TUTOR language used on the PLATO system. Most PLATO games had graphics constructed of individual character sets, but the 3D games on the system were able to draw line-based graphics using the powerful selective erase function enabled by the in-built memory of the plasma screen memory of the PLATO terminals. Fortner added the airplane dashboard to provide more information to players and increase the realism of the program. The program was designated as a “background” game, meaning it utilized freely available system resources and only be played after 10pm at Champaign-Urbana. [1]

The first version of Airfight was released in mid-1974. In 1976, Fortner rewrote the program by himself with upgraded code. [1] It was one of the most popular games on PLATO, competing with the likes of Empire for the most-played action game on the system. Particularly skilled players became legendary over the network with speculation about their identity at any of the many centers of PLATO connection. [2]

Legacy

Along with Spasim, Airfight helped create a legacy of first-person flight simulators on the PLATO system. Most flight simulators created prior to those on PLATO were exclusively limited to high-priced graphics terminals. Games like Airfight were the first experience of many users to three-dimensional graphic as well as multiplayer games.

Flight simulator games subsequently became important hallmark games for mutliplayer networks. The game Dogfight for the SGI series of workstations was among the first flat-shaded polygonal 3D games to feature multiplayer. In 1987, the company Kesmai released Air Warrior over the GEnie timesharing network. This was a breakthrough in the adaptation of multiplayer action games over remote networks. Sierra On-Line featured their Red Baron flight simulator for play over their Sierra Network service.

Airfight has erroneously been listed as an influence on A2/FS-1 Flight Simulator, the first game in the popular Flight Simulator series of games. Creator Bruce Artwick worked at the Aviation Research Lab at Champaign-Urbana on flight simulation programs for graphical terminals. [2] Artwick denied having played any flight simulation games on the PLATO system, though was aware of them. [3]

Brand Fortner later worked for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) run out of the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. He was involved in the early stages of the NCSA Mosaic browser for the World Wide Web, then joined the spin-off Spyglass Inc. who commercialized the Mosaic technology. [1] [4]

Related Research Articles

<i>Microsoft Flight Simulator</i> Series of flight simulator software

Microsoft Flight Simulator is a series of flight simulator programs for MS-DOS, Classic Mac OS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was an early product in the Microsoft application portfolio and differed significantly from Microsoft's other software, which was largely business-oriented. Microsoft Flight Simulator is Microsoft's longest-running software product line, predating Windows 1.0 by three years, and is one of the longest-running video game series of all time.

Spasim is a 32-player 3D networked space flight simulation game and first-person space shooter developed by Jim Bowery for the PLATO computer network and released in March 1974. The game features four teams of eight players, each controlling a planetary system, where each player controls a spaceship in 3D space in first-person view. Two versions of the game were released: in the first, gameplay is limited to flight and space combat, and in the second systems of resource management and strategy were added as players cooperate or compete to reach a distant planet with extensive resources while managing their own systems to prevent destructive revolts. Although Maze is believed to be the earliest 3D game and first-person shooter as it had shooting and multiplayer by fall 1973, Spasim has previously been considered along with it to be one of the "joint ancestors" of the first-person shooter genre, due to earlier uncertainty over Maze's development timeline.

A multiplayer video game is a video game in which more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time, either locally on the same computing system, on different computing systems via a local area network, or via a wide area network, most commonly the Internet. Multiplayer games usually require players to share a single game system or use networking technology to play together over a greater distance; players may compete against one or more human contestants, work cooperatively with a human partner to achieve a common goal, or supervise other players' activity. Due to multiplayer games allowing players to interact with other individuals, they provide an element of social communication absent from single-player games.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PLATO (computer system)</span> Mainframe computer system

PLATO, also known as Project Plato and Project PLATO, was the first generalized computer-assisted instruction system. Starting in 1960, it ran on the University of Illinois's ILLIAC I computer. By the late 1970s, it supported several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Many modern concepts in multi-user computing were first developed on PLATO, including forums, message boards, online testing, email, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer video games.

<i>Maze</i> (1973 video game) 1973 video game

Maze, also known as Maze War, is a 3D multiplayer first-person shooter maze game originally developed in 1973 and expanded in 1974. The first version was developed by high school students Steve Colley, Greg Thompson, and Howard Palmer for the Imlac PDS-1 minicomputer during a school work/study program at the NASA Ames Research Center. By the end of 1973 the game featured shooting elements and could be played on two computers connected together. After Thompson began school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he brought the game to the school's computer science laboratory in February 1974, where he and Dave Lebling expanded it into an eight-player game using the school's Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 mainframe computer and PDS-1 terminals along with adding scoring, top-down map views, and a level editor. Other programmers at MIT improved this version of the game, which was also playable between people at different universities over the nascent ARPANET. Due to the popularity of the game, laboratory managers at MIT both played it while also trying to restrict its use due to the large amount of time students were spending on it. There are reports that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) at one point banned the game from the ARPANET due to its popularity.

1974 saw the expansion of technology and public awareness of video games in all sectors. A proliferation of companies creating commercial video games in the coin-operated sector attracted attention from mainstream press and prompted the diversification of games beyond strict Pong derivatives. The first three-dimensional games were developed for linked graphical terminals which would not be widely commercialized. Some of the first efforts to create video game consoles after the release of Magnavox's Odyssey became available in the United States and Europe.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to video games:

Sublogic Corporation is an American software development company. It was formed in 1977 by Bruce Artwick, and incorporated in 1978 by Artwick's partner Stu Moment as Sublogic Communications Corporation. Sublogic is best known as the creator of the Flight Simulator series, later known as Microsoft Flight Simulator, but it also created other video games such as Night Mission Pinball, Football, and Adventure on a Boat; educational software; and an Apple II graphics library.

Combat flight simulators are vehicle simulation games, amateur flight simulation computer programs used to simulate military aircraft and their operations. These are distinct from dedicated flight simulators used for professional pilot and military flight training which consist of realistic physical recreations of the actual aircraft cockpit, often with a full-motion platform.

<i>pedit5</i> 1975 video game

pedit5, alternately called The Dungeon, is a 1975 dungeon crawl role-playing video game developed for the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's PLATO computer network by Rusty Rutherford. In it, the player controls a character exploring a fixed, single-level dungeon containing randomly-generated monster encounters and treasure. When they encounter a monster, they can fight the monster with a weapon or spells, or attempt to flee. Characters can be saved between sessions.

SIMNET was a wide area network with vehicle simulators and displays for real-time distributed combat simulation: tanks, helicopters and airplanes in a virtual battlefield. SIMNET was developed for and used by the United States military. SIMNET development began in the mid-1980s, was fielded starting in 1987, and was used for training until successor programs came online well into the 1990s.

Microsoft Flight Simulator began as a set of articles on computer graphics, written by Bruce Artwick throughout 1976, about flight simulation using 3-D graphics. When the editor of the magazine told Artwick that subscribers were interested in purchasing such a program, Artwick founded Sublogic Corporation to commercialize his ideas. At first the new company sold flight simulators through mail order, but that changed in January 1979 with the release of Flight Simulator (FS) for the Apple II. They soon followed this up with versions for other systems and from there it evolved into a long-running series of computer flight simulators.

<i>Microsoft Flight Simulator X</i> Flight simulation computer game

Microsoft Flight Simulator X (FSX) is a 2006 flight simulation video game originally developed by Aces Game Studio and published by Microsoft Game Studios for Microsoft Windows. It is the sequel to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 and the tenth installment of the Microsoft Flight Simulator series, which was first released in 1982. It is built on an upgraded graphics rendering engine, showcasing DirectX 10 features in Windows Vista and was marketed by Microsoft as the most important technological milestone in the series at the time. FSX is the first version in the series to be released on DVD media.

Bruce Arthur Artwick is an American software engineer. He is the creator of the first consumer flight simulator software. He founded Sublogic after graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1977, and released the first version of Flight Simulator for the Apple II in 1979. His Apple II software was purchased by Microsoft in 1982 and became Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">First-person (video games)</span> Graphical perspective in video games

In video games, first-person is any graphical perspective rendered from the viewpoint of the player character, or from the inside of a device or vehicle controlled by the player character. It is one of two perspectives used in the vast majority of video games, with the other being third-person, the graphical perspective from outside of any character ; some games such as interactive fiction do not belong to either format.

Online games are video games played over a computer network. The evolution of these games parallels the evolution of computers and computer networking, with new technologies improving the essential functionality needed for playing video games on a remote server. Many video games have an online component, allowing players to play against or cooperatively with players across a network around the world.

Aces Game Studio (ACES) was an American video game developer based in Redmond, Washington, owned by Microsoft Game Studios. It was founded in 1988 under the name Bruce Artwick Organization Limited at Champaign, Illinois, by Bruce Artwick, creator of Microsoft Flight Simulator, Microsoft Space Simulator and also co-founder of Sublogic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Flight simulation video game</span> Video game genre

A flight simulation video game refers to the simulation of various aspects of flight or the flight environment for purposes other than flight training or aircraft development. A significant community of simulation enthusiasts is supported by several commercial software packages, as well as commercial and homebuilt hardware. Open-source software that is used by the aerospace industry like FlightGear, whose flight dynamics engine (JSBSim) is used in a 2015 NASA benchmark to judge new simulation code to space industry standards, is also available for private use. A popular type of flight simulators video games are combat flight simulators, which simulate combat air operations from the pilot and crew's point of view. Combat flight simulation titles are more numerous than civilian flight simulators due to variety of subject matter available and market demand.

<i>Flight Simulator</i> (1980 video game) 1980 video game

Flight Simulator is a video game published in 1980 by Sublogic for the Apple II. A TRS-80 version (T80-FS1) followed later that year. It is the first in a line of simulations from Sublogic which, beginning in 1982, were also sold by Microsoft as Microsoft Flight Simulator.

<i>Microsoft Flight Simulator</i> (1986 video game) 1986 video game

Microsoft Flight Simulator is a 1986 video game developed by Sublogic and published by Microsoft for the Macintosh.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Moss, Richard (2017-09-16). "2 - Airfight". The Life & Times of Video Games. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Dear, Brian (2017). The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the Rise of Cyberculture. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN   978-1-101-87155-3.
  3. ↑ Computer History Museum (2010-06-23). PLATO@50: An Early Community of Multiplayer Games . Retrieved 2024-12-18– via YouTube.
  4. ↑ "Brand I. Fortner". grainger.illinois.edu. 2005. Retrieved 2024-12-18.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.