The flying area is the entire world, it promises. Admittedly it does so after talking about photo-realistic graphics, which to be true requires a fascinating low resolution definition of photo which must have looked at stretch even in 1993, but the freedom of the whole globe is still a bold and enticing claim. Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0 – the latest in a series whose beginning in 1982 predates not only Windows but also Mario Bros., Manic Miner, and the entire time period covered by Super Chart Island – doesn’t offer much in the way of instant thrills, but instead holds up its thoroughness as an attraction.
Coming right alongside Championship Manager ‘93, there’s a similar philosophy working for both games. They target enthusiasts who wish they could do a particular difficult-to-get-into real life job, providing them with an obsessive level of detail to simulate that wish, be it as football manager or pilot. What exactly players want to do in their imagined role is left largely up to them to set out. There may be some correlation between people likely to have got a home computer in 1993 and people with a yearning for the technical detail of those roles, but it’s also a sign of increasing reach of computers and games. The audience of potential players was big enough to have subsets with some very specific interests.
It was when I came to test out the talk of the entire world that even more interesting aspects of Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0 hit me. Its initial demo and tutorial shows a takeoff from Chicago, complete with tour-guide-style notes on landmarks visible to either side. I don’t know Chicago, though, so I tested other options. There is a list of starting airports, sub-divided into region. The number in the USA vastly outnumbers the rest of the world put together. Paris and Munich are the only European options on offer. In less than a decade, the move from the popularity of the UK’s own ZX Spectrum to more players playing games on PC and within Microsoft’s DOS or Windows has taken us from games about Milk Marketing Board-run British cycle races to something which doesn’t bother adding in the landscape of the UK.
When choosing locations and plane to fly, though, it wasn’t just from a pre-made menu, but from a list of files in a browser. The implication is significant. This is a game made to be modified, for users to fill in any gaps themselves. Flight Simulator 5.0 wasn’t the first edition to offer this approach, but it was when it started to take on new life. By 5.1, people had made editors to make it even easier to make your own scenery, planes and everything else. With the worldwide web starting to pick up – a minority concern for a while yet, but again one where the users had a decent crossover with those into flight sims – someone with the right expertise could design the area around London Gatwick airport for you, put it online, and you could add it into your game and fly over a ‘photo-realistic’ Crawley to your heart’s content. With a little help, the entire world was on its way.
PC chart, Edge 003, December 1993