By the time Psion published Horace and the Spiders, they were a well-established success story. Sinclair had struck a deal with Psion to get first option on co-publishing each of their games, and getting said games advertised by the company that made the Spectrum was working out well for both. The one game their success was built on above all others was Flight Simulation. Although it replaced Horace and the Spiders at #1 in the UK charts, it was a story which went some way further back. It was a triumph of physics and imagination, which followed Psion through a developing medium.

David Potter founded Psion in 1980, having worked with computers during his time in academic science at Imperial College London and University of California, Los Angeles. The ‘PSI’ in Psion stood for Potter Scientific Instruments, and he invested a large amount of his savings into the new venture. He saw home computers as an exciting new frontier, took an interest in Sinclair’s ZX80, and worked out distribution deals with some software writers. Then he wanted to get into making more ambitious software, and hired one of his former students and research assistants from Imperial to help.

Charles Davies has described himself as “one of the few people out of Wales who just can’t sing to save their lives”. He got on rather better with physics and maths. When he did his PhD, he chose David Potter as his supervisor partly because Potter had written a book on computational physics. Davies got into working on computers too, programming with punch-cards. When hired for Psion, he enjoyed the luxury of being able to code on screen, and started work on games for the Sinclair ZX81. Their first games were a chess game and Fantasy Games, a double pack of text adventures (Perilous Swamp and Sorcerer’s Island) to which they added the graphical flourish of a map which updates each time you move.

Perilous Swamp (Psion, ZX81, 1982)

Then they had an idea which was ideally suited to their physics and programming skills: making a flight simulator. They released it in 1982, so we are talking about a time after Sublogic’s Flight Simulator (1980) but just before that series gained its Microsoft Flight Simulator branding. Home computer flight simulation was still a pretty new business, particularly on the ZX81 rather than American microcomputers. Davies and Potter got out their equations and made a rather effective simulator which not only included various gauges and read-outs and a map, but even a view out the window. This required a bit of imagination, since it was essentially just the horizon as a line with a few possible angles, but this was the ZX81.

Flight Simulation (Psion, ZX81, 1982)

Psion’s Flight Simulation became easily their biggest ZX81 hit. Once the ZX Spectrum took off, it made sense to create a version for that machine too. This would not extend to having more than two colours in the view, although those would be a more lifelike sky blue and… dark blue? It would include both two airports and some other sights along the way, mostly lakes in basic geometric shapes. “We had great fun”, recalled Potter later. “We worked out some of the theory together, and Charles implemented it in the computer”.

As with many games in this era it’s difficult to get a definite release date. Its first appearances in less comprehensive Spectrum charts date to the very start of 1983, from which point it was a perennial seller. One later Psion employee has claimed that they even sold more copies of the Spectrum version than Sinclair sold Spectrums in total. Even with duplicates, bundles, and a tight definition of “Sinclair”, this doesn’t seem credible (and similar hyperbolic claims have been made about other games, like Elite and the BBC Micro). Still, once the full charts I’m using came in, Flight Simulation rarely left the top ten for the rest of the year either side of its one fortnight at the top.

Compared to what came later, Flight Simulation is rather simple. You can increase and decrease power and move in four directions, with fairly quick visual and numerical feedback, plus raise and lower your landing gear. Taking off and cruising came easier than I expected. There are a lot of different measurements going on, and landing the plane is a technical challenge which apparently long-defeated much better pilots than me. Outside of that challenge, though, you can slowly drift your way across the sky, checking up on the map and seeing that, yes, you haven’t moved that far.

Flight Simulation’s early arrival definitely counted in its favour. Tony Bridge in Popular Computing Weekly gave it as one example of how “programmers have seized the Spectrum by the throat, and taken full advantage of its colour, graphic and sound capabilities to produce programs that were undreamt of a few months ago”. When Sinclair User included it in their all-time top 50 eighteen months later, they referred to it as “the first ‘serious’ game for the Spectrum”. Its appeal faded a bit as other flight simulators added other things like more variety and, inevitably, guns, but it wasn’t completely lost. “If you enjoy contemplative games, this is still one of the best”, said Crash in 1984.

By the time the leading games were trending less technical, Potter, Davies and Psion had directed their attention elsewhere. In 1984 they launched the Psion Organiser, a pocket computer priced at £99.95, a familiar price point from the ZX Spectrum. For the next decade plus, their organisers and PDAs would go on to be a very successful business, before they eventually lost ground to US competitors Palm. That later success has been much of the reason it has been so comparatively easy to find information about their earlier days.

Their future might not have been in games, but they had been perfectly placed for a short time. I am not the type to get caught up in Flight Simulation, but I enjoyed reading about people who were. In particular, one S. Warcand of Gillingham, Kent, who wrote into Home Computing Weekly in February 1984 proposing a novel way to improve Flight Simulation. “All you do is find a map, around five miles to the inch, and draw grids on it the same as on the map in the program, for example 16 miles square […] the main runway in the program could represent the runway at Heathrow, and the club is in virtually the same portion as Ipswich.” Psion brought the science, and the players brought the imagination.

MRIB individual formats games chart for fortnight ending 29 September 1983, Personal Computer News

Top of the charts for the two weeks ending 24 September 1983 & 01 October 1983

UK games: Flight Simulation (Psion, ZX Spectrum)

UK films: Staying Alive

UK singles: Culture Club – Karma Chameleon

UK albums: Paul Young – No Parlez

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