Flight Sim
Aircraft, spacecraft, and the pleasure of a long manual
Simulated flight, from combat aircraft to trading spacecraft. One of the few home-computer genres that traded reflexes for study, and a genre that made a virtue of complexity when everything else was shedding it.
The flight sim asks the player to fly something plausibly: to manage thrust, attitude, fuel and instruments, not steer alone. It covers combat aircraft, civil aviation and — importantly for the British scene — space trading, where Elite turned a flight model into an economy.
It was the era’s most demanding genre in the literal sense. Flight sims shipped with the thickest manuals, expected keyboard overlays, and assumed a player willing to read before playing. In a market otherwise moving toward immediacy, they made study the point.
The archive puts it among the largest categories: roughly 16,000 pages across nearly 5,000 issues, under flight sim, flight simulator and flight simulation — four spellings the press used interchangeably.
Fast facts
- Core loop: take off, navigate, engage or trade, land.
- Input: the whole keyboard, plus a joystick.
- Documentation: manuals as thick as the game was long.
- Defining titles: Elite, Starglider, Wing Commander, Microsoft’s Flight Simulator.
- Skill model: knowledge and planning over reaction speed.
Genre conventions
- Instrument panel: a substantial fraction of the screen given to gauges.
- Multiple view modes: cockpit, chase, external, map.
- Flight model: momentum and inertia, not direct positional control.
- Failure by attrition: fuel, damage and navigation errors, not enemy fire alone.
- Persistent progress: ranks, ratings, cargo, or a save that mattered.
The British variant
Elite (1984) is the genre’s local landmark and does not fit its usual description. It combined a wireframe 3D flight model with procedurally generated galaxies and an open-ended trading economy, on a BBC Micro. Its influence ran through the British scene for a decade, and its structure — fly, trade, upgrade, choose your own goals — arguably founded a genre of its own that the period had no name for.
Evolution
- 1980-83: wireframe beginnings, constrained by 8-bit maths.
- 1984: Elite fuses flight, trade and open structure.
- 1986-90: 16-bit machines allow filled polygons and credible terrain.
- 1990s: the genre splits into hardcore study sims and accessible space combat.