Red Baron

Red Baron put the player into the cockpits of World War I biplanes and showed that a flight simulator doesn't have to be all about radar and missiles. The aircraft of 1915 to 1918 are slow, fragile, and armed with nothing but machine guns, so combat plays out at close range, in constant circling and jockeying for an advantageous position over the opponent. That very slowness is the game's greatest strength: the player has time to take in what's happening, and every kill is the result of patient maneuvering rather than a single trigger pull.

At its core is a pilot's career, where the player picks a side in the conflict, advances along the front, earns ranks and decorations, and moves on to more modern aircraft as the years pass. The game tracks personal score, kill count, and whether the pilot survives, complemented by a gallery of real aces you can face in stand-alone duels. Alongside the career sit individual missions, from escorting bombers to attacking observation balloons to free hunts over the front. Technically the game relied on Dynamix's polygon engine, which handled smooth flight scenes, and the atmosphere was rounded out by period trench scenery and a simple but effective sound design.

At the time, Red Baron became one of the most popular flight simulators of its era, and for a great many players it was the very first game that drew them into dogfighting. It also opened the door to a whole wave of World War I games, and its later sequels built directly on that legacy. Today Red Baron is pleasantly accessible: the controls are simpler than in more modern simulators, the pace is slow, and the career mode can draw in even a player who knows nothing about aircraft. Few 1990 games have aged this gracefully. Behind that stands mainly the clarity of the whole situation. In the air you can always see who is where, the fight happens in a small space, and the outcome is almost always the result of the player's own decisions rather than some invisible system. That very directness makes Red Baron one of the best introductions to flight simulators there is.