Something’s been tickling my mind, for awhile, and I wonder if I can tap the savants of esoterica here for help.
I’m trying to ID a commercial Flight Sim game I saw the box of, I think in a Software, Etc., sometime between about the mid-90s to possibly early 2000s.
One of the boasts on the box was for the accuracy—or at least detail—noting that it actually animated enemy SAM sites reloading after firing all their missiles. Accompanied by a screenshot of several 3D human figures—I believe Middle Eastern, with desert camo and berets—hefting a missile, obviously too large to be a MANPAD, over their shoulders, presumably to pop on a launcher. Neat image.
Now, memory is inevitably hazy. I’m only seeing a couple of Russia/Soviet SAM models (the likely candidate for a “bad guy” weapon supplier in a 90s American game) that could conceivably be lifted by a crew of humans, maybe if only in less than ideal circumstances. That’s assuming I didn’t misremember, and the figures weren’t manhandling a missile attached to a crate, or on a cart. Or, of course, that the game developers didn’t just stick in something inaccurate because they didn’t know better or it looked cool…
But, that’s aside the point, I guess. I’d just love to know the name of that game, after all these long years. Can anyone help?
I’ll give you a “bump” by saying it’s not familiar. Are you certain it was primarily a flight or flight combat simulator (F-15, Falcon, etc) and not a more ground-based game like Arma (which wasn’t yet released in the 90s, but just as an example)?
…gosh, that entire era of sim games. The Microprose games, the Dynamix ones. They were so great. A10 Tank Killer had one of my favourite video game theme songs ever:
Back in the day when we didn’t have the resolution to expend huge effort on visuals, game developers had to focus on game design. The games looked primitive, but I think some of them were still incredibly fun to play, even by today’s standards.
I have a Air Traffic Control game called TRACON that was just awesome. I played it for a decade after they stopped selling it. Eventually it became incompatible with new versions of Windows.
I’m relatively certain, as that’s where my interests would have been running around that time, and probably because the inclusion of 3D enemy “humans” in a flight sim would have caught my attention more than if it’d been a more ground-based game.
Browsing through some screenshots of notable 90s flight sims, I wonder if it might have been one of the Jane’s titles—maybe one of the Longbow games, which apparently (from the text I’m seeing online) did include simulated humans, including enemy troops “taking pot shots” at the player, and an attack helicopter sim does seem a more likely platform to include such touches than a dogfighting-centered jet sim.
And a lot of the Jane’s game boxes—gosh, I miss the big boxes—do have a format similar to what I remember from the mystery game (lots of screenshots, happily captioned with the technical stickler features included) but I haven’t seen any with that particular screencap/caption that I’m remembering.
On the other hand, a lot of the titles also had the “front flap” that opened up, revealing a couple of pages worth of text/pictures, and not all of those seem to have ended up scanned or photographed. (Even on the eBay sales) That’s assuming it even WAS a Jane’s title, not some rare budget game that I just lucked into finding.
You might be on the right path. I was a BIG Apache Longbow player, and I do know that, from the air, individual soldiers and similar assets were modeled and shown, but I myself never changed camera or otherwise tried to get a different PoV of the soldiers, so I can’t say if such detail was actually in the game.
I kind of wish I’d played that. I was always a F-15 Strike Eagle III type guy myself, along with a colossal dose of “Project Stealth Fighter” back in the C64 days. I also played a LOT of Gunship and Gunship 2000, if helicopter sims count.
Back in the 1990s, the military flight sims for accuracy were the Falcon series- Falcon 3.0 was the one I had, and its flight modelwas too realistic to be fun, much like IL-2 Sturmovik was a decade or so later.
I played just about every available combat flight sim in the 1990s and early 2000s, and I’m trying to remember seeing something like that on the box. So far striking out. It might have been a graphic in the game manual, which tended to be large and very technical back in those days.
Somewhat inspired by Raza’s post, and a chance mention I noticed in a wiki crawl of the “Virtual Battlefield Environment” touted by the A-10 Attack flight sim.
Thinking there might indeed have been some kind of proto-ARMA, I searched for “wiki flight simulator ‘virtual battlefield’”, and one of the top results was…“Hind,” from 1996.
Luckily enough, there were some box scans online. The largest was this:
The dating is right, the genre is roughly right (a flight sim, but the “virtual battlefield” is a feature that allowed network play with an AH-64 sim the company also produced), and the screenshot is about right, allowing for the haze of years and memory.
It seems the “missile crew reloading” is just a group of 3D Afghan mujaheddin armed with "SAM-7"s (the SA-7, a Russian “Stinger”). Several of them, in the screenshot, kneeling in a group that, on a relatively tiny box printing—and using not-quite-top-tier 3D graphics, circa 1996—to a much younger me with less technical saavy—and, I just realized, before I got glasses—could probably have looked like a crew of guys hefting a single missile.
So, one more ghost laid to rest. Unless I give into temptation and buy Hind on GOG.
They were apparently VERY proud of the Mujahideen guerrillas lifting a SAM-7 to their shoulders - ready to fire. Since they mentioned not once, but twice, said Mujahideen guerrillas lifting a SAM-7 to their shoulder - ready to fire. (The shoulder(s) are plural in the first instance, singular in the second, but otherwise the description of the Mujahideen guerrillas lifting a SAM-7 is identical.) And god dammit, they made an impact with it, because that’s the thing that stuck in your memory after all those years.
