Doing some research and trying to track down some supporting information for something I have been thinking about, I have been trying to find a definitive overview of flight simulation history on the PC. Unfortunately, almost everything I can find seems to be almost exclusively Microsoft oriented, to the point that it almost appears that there were no other Sims of note beyond Microsoft flight simulator releases.

 

Any sim other than Microsoft FS seems only able to garner a sentence or two, if that, and gaps in supposedly complete history's skip year after year of releases from anyone other than Microsoft.

 

Are there any complete in-depth history's, or is this information drifting away in the sands o' time?

This website has a pretty good coverage of the history of MSFS going back to the original creator Bruce Artwick:

http://fshistory.simflight.com/

 

I found the most exciting period was MSFS 4 when Bruce Artwick was actively publishing addons for it with his companies BAO and Mallard. A lot of innovations in that time.

This website has a pretty good coverage of the history of MSFS going back to the original creator Bruce Artwick:

http://fshistory.simflight.com/

 

I found the most exciting period was MSFS 4 when Bruce Artwick was actively publishing addons for it with his companies BAO and Mallard. A lot of innovations in that time.

 

Thank you :-)

 

But actually this is an example of exactly what I meant. I am looking for history's that cover all flight sims.

It all started with the link trainers.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_Trainer

 

The flight school I taught at used to have some. They said the funniest thing was when the bungee motion system broke and ejected the student.

I will brainstorm some of the ones I've used other then MSFS

 

Flight Assignment: ATP - Sublogic

Jet - Sublogic

Flight Unlimited 1 2 & 3 - Looking Glass / Eidos

Fly - Terminal Reality

 

There are more but these are the key ones I remember

Sid Meier and Microprose (predictive text even tried making this Microsoft!) were big in the '80s/early '90s. I also flew something by Mirrorsoft circa then too.

 

I doubt there is a history about these things in one place. A the time, many things don't seem worthy of being called 'history', so doesn't perhaps get recorded or preserved as it should have been. This might be be ideal place to start collating that, assuming it could stay on track and any potential ego issues that can come up with contemporary history could be avoided. That would simply start with a list of every piece of software we can all remember, along with a year and what it ran (or crawled, depending on your point of view) on.

 

Mike

Microprose was a big one for Combat Flight Sims. One of my favourites was B-17 Flying Fortress. The Falcon Series (3.0 and 4.0) was another one of my favourites

 

Here is a Wiki list of published Microprose titles:

http://en.wikipedia....icroProse_games

MiGMan's Flight Sim Museum..... been around for years now and an excellent trip down memory lane...

 

http://www.index.migman.com/

Hmmmmmmm........

 

It seems even more titles than I thought have faded into the shadows. Even sorting through the Microprose list is going to be a handful! Ty Matthew.

 

If people come up with more titles, I hope we can avoid the whole silly game/sim thing.

 

I am also really interested in titles that made significant impacts, such as advancing the state of the art in some fashion, or making some significant contribution.

 

For instance, I believe it was a flight sim of some sort that was the first to try putting textures onto the usual shaded polygons of a certain era, but I am not certain.

 

@Cessanaflyer, I actually found that page and more! I have a few pics now of a flight sim where this sort of huge crane moved a camera across a gigantic physical model of the terrain. No clouds and weather modeling there, I bet. :-)

 

Trying to contain it to the PC, though.

 

Fly had all the potential to give MS a run for their money, but for his untimely and young death

 

Taken from the Fly forum below

 

This forum and all others related to the FLY series of flight simulator, are dedicated to the memory of Richard Harvey - the lead designer for Terminal Reality's Fly.

 

At the AVSIM FANCON of 2002, Richard and his wife, Tara, attended. Richard was presented with AVSIM's Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to the flight simulation genre and his outstanding service and support of the FS community. Richard was a friend to many of us, and never hesitated to assist and inspire. Richard passed away the following March, 2003. He is sorely missed by his friends and those that were privileged to know him.

Yah. I managed to come across a few references to it. But its kinda difficult! Any query's using the word "flight" and "simulator" tend to point at something from Microsoft. Even searches using the words "Fly" and "Sim" will not take you to any information on this product.

 

It seems that unless you know something very specific that will lead the search engine to bypass Microsoft and zero in, its really hard to get information without being led to FS.

 

I wonder what other things are being artificially deleted from history by goggles weighted searches?

FLY did have a great ATC system and had the option to turn on and off taxi guidance similar to FSX today. It was certainly a Flight Sim that raised the bar for the MSFS franchise at the time

 

The guys behind it were former Microsoft employee Mark Randel who worked on MSFS 4.0. As well as Brett Combs, a former employee of Bruce Artwicks company Mallard. These guys both had a lot of experience with MSFS before they started FLY

 

Here is the Wiki article on Terminal Reality:

http://en.wikipedia....erminal_Reality

Seems somebody could probably write a book on this!

 

There is an awful lot of history.......

Wikipedia has quite a bit about the various flight sims over the years. I was only the other day reading about the Flight Unlimited series which I remember very fondly. Apparently the first Flight Unlimited's lead programmer was an aeronautical engineer and programmed an extremely complex flight model. He left after a disagreement with a corporate-appointed manager about what direction the sequel should take. The programmers that were brought in to replace him couldn't fathom the flight model he had programmed and so reverted to a more simple flight model for FU2 and FU3.

 

Interesting stuff.

Interesting stuff.

 

Yes it is, at least to me. Nearly as interesting might be finding out how some major flight sim software houses started and grew to what they are now. It would be nice to see a series of articles for instance covering the history's of some companies.

 

Does anyone know if its ever been done? If I thought I had even a tenth of the time necessary. I would probably jump on it. History was always a biggie for me.