Hagionaut: Falcon 3

Anthony Fordham is turning and turning in the widening gyre.

DEVELOPER: SPECTRUM HOLOBYTE

PERSONALITIES: GILMAN LOUIE

RELEASED: 1991

NUTSHELL: DESPITE NOT HAVING TEXTURES, IT BROUGHT (CLAIMED) MILITARY-GRADE FLIGHT MODELLING TO THE PC, WITH SUCH EXTREME PREJUDICE THAT FOR THE FIRST TIME, IT MADE PEOPLE UPGRADE THEIR COMPUTERS JUST TO PLAY THIS SINGLE GAME.

The PC didn’t become the tech-leader for gaming just because of hardware. After all, what’s the advantage of a PC that can play games just as well as other platforms, if it costs five times as much? The PC needed to show there was a reason for all that grunt. And at the dawn of the 1990s, that reason was the PC owner’s thirst for insanely detailed combat flight simulators.

For the first few years in the market, gaming on an 8086-based, “IBM-compatible” PC was a distraction, like playing Snake on a Nokia 3210. But when Intel released the 386 in 1985 PC gaming entered its first Golden Age.

Almost overnight, the 386 made the PC the most powerful and capable home platform, so all it had to do was win the hearts and minds and wallets of Amiga 1000 and Atari

ST owners to realise its destiny as the true home - the only home - of the newest and most technically complex games. To win those wallets, PC had to show there were games that the Amiga and Atari couldn’t run. Games the kinds of people who spent $7,000 on a Compaq DeskPro would think worthy of their superior intellects. Thus: the flight simulator.

THE FALCON

CANNOT HEAR THE FALCONER

Sure, other platforms had, shall we say, aeroplane games. And more power to them. The world would be a poorer place without Afterburner. But the PC allowed actual flight simulation. As in, games where everything took a back seat to modelling the flight dynamics and operation of an aircraft, as close to reality as possible.

We’ll revisit Microsoft Flight Simulator (and its cooler younger brother Combat Flight Simulator) in a later Game Changer trip, but I mention it not just because of its dad-cool domination of the space, but also because it reflects the core philosophy of PC flight simulation: obsession.

Obsessive creators, obsessive players. Case in point: In 1987, a mob from Palo Alto called Spectrum Holobyte, released a flight sim called Falcon. It focused on the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon (obviously) and was an early example of a flight sim that made gamers say “wow, flying a jet fighter is hard work!”

THINGS FALL APART, THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD

But Falcon was also ported to the Amiga and Atari because there just weren’t that many PC gamers to keep a developer afloat, back in 1987. Even worse, the Amiga and Atari editions were arguably better - they had a very early implementation of the idea of a “dynamic battlefield”, where stuff you blew up in one mission stayed blown up in the next.

By 1991 though, the tables were turning. There were even more PC brands available, prices of 386-based machines had descended from astronomical, through cislunar, to merely stratospheric, and there were now enough PC gamers to justify exclusive titles.

Not that Spectrum Holobyte’s magnum opus was deliberately exclusive. Falcon 3.0 (Falcon 2.0 was called Falcon AT and it ran in EGA, so, moving on) shattered paradigms. Spectrum Holobyte embraced a concept that would serve developers well for at least the next 15 years: we don’t care what PC you have. If our game won’t run on yours, buy a better one.

MERE ANARCHY IS LOOSED UPON THE WORLD

The editor of this magazine bought a better one. He agonised over whether he could justify spending all of his money on a 386, or all of his money plus some additional money he’d have to get somewhere, on a 386 with a math coprocessor.

Falcon 3.0 used - or at least Spectrum Holobyte claimed it used - flight data from military simulators. What does that mean? It meant the game had a “high fidelity flight mode”. And that basically meant Falcon 3.0 did more maths, thus the editorial agonising over the math coprocessor.

So what was Falcon 3.0 like to play? As far as anyone who bought it could tell, it was like trying to fly an actual F-16 using a consumergrade joystick and a keyboard. That the F-16 really does have a highly computerised control system (it was the first fly-by-wire combat aircraft) certainly means that in principle, it should be possible to simulate exactly how the real jet would respond to any given input.

In practice, of course, Falcon 3.0 had to work within the limitations of the 386 and 486 platforms. Resolution? 640x400. FPS? Not really a thing. Textures on objects? Not invented yet.

But because the PC could do numbers, so many numbers, it made the collection of geometric shapes that vaguely resembled an F-16 fly like an F-16.

EVERYWHERE THE CEREMONY OF INNOCENCE IS DROWNED

Falcon 3.0 showed that the PC could be serious (realistic simulation) but that this didn’t need to mean boring (Cessna 172 at Chicago Meigs ugh).

Since Falcon 3.0, the PC has been the only home of the properly serious military flight simulator. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, so many shooty-plane-games came and went. They were mostly trend-based. First it was WW2 (Aces of the Pacific/Over Europe), then it got really specific in the F-22 (various, including Gears of War’s DICE), then the IL2-Sturmovik for some reason. Even the SU-27 had a long, long day in the sun.

Flip forward to 2019, and the only real game in town is DCS - Digital Combat Simulator. All the planes, all the theatres, all the multiplayer F/A-18 missions where everyone but you bombs from 1000 feet despite you reminding them constantly...

SURELY SOME REVELATION IS AT HAND..

The technological gulf between DCS and Falcon 3.0 is immense, but spiritually, they’re the same kind of software. Combat flight simulators on the PC are one of the few types of games that harness and justify all that power. The only thing you need to justify is the cost of all the joysticks, pedals, headtrackers, and (these days) VR goggles these games, inevitably, make you want to guy.