Fighter Pilot

Fighter Pilot was one of the first serious flight simulators to arrive on 8-bit home computers, and on the ZX Spectrum in 1984 it showed that even modest hardware could carry an honest simulation of flight. The player sits in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft and must handle take-off, instrument navigation, aerial combat, and landing – everything is governed by a set of gauges for speed, altitude, and fuel that try to mimic a real instrument panel. The game distinguishes between a training mode, where the pilot can practise take-offs and landings without risk, and a combat mode with enemy aircraft, with controls handled entirely from the keyboard and requiring the player to memorize a whole range of key shortcuts for the plane's individual functions.

The visuals are necessarily sparse – the sky and terrain are rendered as simple coloured areas with wireframe outlines for opponents – but thanks to a fairly smooth screen update, the game managed to evoke a genuine sense of flight, an unusual experience on the Spectrum in the mid-1980s. The audio is limited to warning beeps and simple engine effects, so the atmosphere is carried mainly by the controls themselves and the tension of an enemy closing in on the radar. The game was even sold with a printed manual full of instrument-panel diagrams, which helped players get their bearings in an unusually complex interface.

Fighter Pilot became a commercial and critical success and kicked off a whole line of further simulators from Digital Integration, such as Tomahawk and F-16 Combat Pilot, which further developed and refined the genre on the Spectrum. In its time, it was praised precisely for the boldness of offering a slower, more thoughtful type of game at a time when the market was dominated by fast-paced arcade titles. Today the game is valuable mainly as a historical record of how far it was possible to go with the limited hardware of the time – the controls feel slow and the graphics are archaic, but for fans of flight simulator history it holds an irreplaceable place as a pioneering effort in its genre.

Why play it: For fans of flight simulator history, Fighter Pilot holds an irreplaceable place as a pioneering title, even though its slow pace and archaic graphics demand patience today.