Project Stealth Fighter

Project Stealth Fighter (later reissued as F-19 Stealth Fighter) is a combat flight simulation from MicroProse that came out on the Commodore 64 in 1987 and built on a topic that was highly current at the time – a fictional American stealth aircraft whose real-world shape was still a military secret when the game was released. The player plans missions, chooses loadouts, and takes off on flights where the low detectability of the aircraft must be used to penetrate deep into enemy airspace, where radar, fighter jets, and ground-based air defenses await.

The gameplay combines strategic mission planning on a map with the actual flight in the cockpit, where the player watches the radar, lock-on warning systems, and the state of fuel and ammunition. Unlike simpler arcade simulations, the game emphasizes tactics – slipping past unnoticed is often a better choice than direct confrontation with enemy defenses, so the player has to learn to plan the route just as carefully as the combat itself. The graphics on the C64 were fairly detailed given the hardware's limits, with a clear cockpit and smooth terrain rendering, though naturally simpler than on the more powerful platforms the game was later released for as well.

The game became one of MicroProse's iconic titles, and thanks to its speculative vision of stealth technology it drew attention even outside the usual circle of simulation fans – it remains an interesting footnote that its resemblance to the real F-117, then under development, attracted attention beyond the gaming community as well. On the C64 it still stands today as a demonstration of just how far MicroProse was willing to go in its ambition to bring a complex military simulation to an eight-bit computer without collapsing into unplayable complexity, and why the studio became synonymous at the time with credible military simulations that other publishers tried to match with their own competing titles.

Why play: For fans of ambitious military simulations on eight-bit hardware – the speculative vision of F-117 stealth technology remains one of the boldest games MicroProse ever released on the C64.