On the one hand, I want to celebrate the games that still stand up today, maybe even get some of you to try them for the first time all these years later - and I’ve yet to find a vintage flight simulator which I can recommend on those terms. The case of flight simulators thus serves to illustrate some of the natural tensions implicit in what I do here. Therefore they and the many games like them have appeared in these histories only in the form of passing mentions. Revisited today, however, all of those games strike me as absurdly, unplayably primitive. Growing up in the 1980s, I certainly wasn’t immune to the appeal of virtual flight I spent many hours with subLogic’s Flight Simulator II and MicroProse’s Gunship on my Commodore 64, then hours more with F/A-18 Interceptor on my Commodore Amiga. When we look back on them today, we find ourselves shaking our heads and asking what the heck we were all thinking. But they were perhaps the ones in which this requirement was most marked. No, they weren’t the only games that required a large helping of imagination to overlook their underwhelming audiovisuals, that had sometimes to ask their players to see them as what they aspired to be rather than what they actually were. It seems to me that vintage flight simulators have aged worse than just about any other genre of game. The same thing has obviously happened to flight simulators. As audio fidelity has gotten better and better, our standards have gotten higher and higher if we listen to a phonograph from 1910, it sounds horrible to our modern ears.
They got the same enjoyment out of that Edison phonograph that we do out of high-fidelity.
Clearly the standard that they had for audio fidelity back in 1910 was radically different from the standard we have. After Edison’s original phonograph came out, people said that they could not detect a difference between a phonograph and a real performance.
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