Classic PC Game Review: MicroProse's 'F-15 Strike Eagle III'

Do you remember MicroProse Software’s F-15 Strike Eagle series of video games/simulators? I sure do; the three editions of the classic game were among my favorite pastimes when I was younger and had several PCs that ran on the MS-DOS operating system.

If you are old enough to have played DOS-based computer games in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, you probably played one of the now-gone (but not forgotten) Maryland software company co-founded by retired Air Force colonel John Wilbur (Wild Bill) Stealey, Sr. and legendary game designer Sid Meier, who is best known for creating Sid Meier’s Civilization and Sid Meier’s Pirates!

The F-15 Strike Eagle franchise was launched in 1985 by its eponymous Meier-designed flight simulator for the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64. A first-person perspective-based game dominated by a representation of a Heads-Up Display (HUD), F-15 Strike Eagle was almost an instant hit, and eventually, MicroProse ported the game to the DOS-based IBM PC system. Other versions of the game included a port to the Apple II home computer, a revised version that came with 3.5-in. installation discs and limited EGA graphics capability, and more “ports” to other PCs and gaming consoles such as NES, Game Boy, and Amstrad CPC. By 1987, over 250,000 copies were sold, and the game became a classic of its genre.

F-15 Strike Eagle II package. (C) MicroProse Software

By 1989, F-15 Strike Eagle’s simple wire-frame style graphics and limited palette of colors and sounds were making the game look dated and primitive. It was still fun to play, but as computers became more powerful and their abilities to display better graphics with more sound options increased, it was clear that an upgrade was necessary. Consequently, MicroProse’s in-house game designing division MPS Labs developed a sequel, F-15 Strike Eagle II. Sid Meier had moved on from designing flight sims (his last one was F-19 Stealth Fighter) to strategy games such as Civilization and Colonization. In his stead, Andy Hollis (another founding member of the company) stepped in to design F-15 Strike Eagle II.

Hollis had collaborated with Meier on F-19 Stealth Fighter, so he and a team that included Ken Lagace, Michael O’Haire, Murray Taylor, and Max D. Remington III designed a muscular upgrade of the original game. It had the same visual style as F-19, but it kept the original game’s sometimes anachronistic theaters of operations in the main game. (Per the F-15 Strike Eagle II manual, players who owned both games could “port” F-19’s scenarios by copying some of the relevant game files into a 3.5-inch floppy disk. I only owned F-15 Strike Eagle II, so I never got to do that.)

The third and final MicroProse release of the F-15 Strike Eagle series was 1992’s F-15 Strike Eagle III. Once again, Andy Hollis was tapped as the project lead; as the game producer, he led an all-new design team that included Christopher Clark, James M. Day, George Wargo, and Hollis himself. Joined by artists such as Barbara Bents, Stacey Clark, and Erroll Roberts, sound designers Ken Lagace, Jim McConkey, and Roland J. Rizzo, Hollis and the design team he led came up with the most realistic entry in the F-15 Strike Eagle series.

The Basics

F-15 Strike Eagle III is a flight simulator/video game designed originally for DOS-based PCs with VGA graphics cards capable of displaying 256 colors, AdLib sound cards or their equivalent, and keyboard/mouse controls. For the best gaming experience, a joystick was recommended but not required; in those days, most DOS-based flight simulators were designed to work mostly with keyboard controls.

Like the other games in the series, F-15 Strike Eagle III allows players to fly a McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing) F-15E Strike Eagle. This is a two-seat fighter-bomber variant of the basic F-15A/C Eagle interceptor. Introduced in 1988, the F-15E’s primary mission is to attack ground or sea targets with a variety of bombs and missiles, which is less glamorous than the air-to-air interceptor role of its single-seat Eagle stablemates. However, the Strike Eagle retains its air-to-air capability and can carry – depending on the mission profile and weapons loadout – four to eight air-to-air missiles of different types. This allows a player to engage enemy aircraft at every stage of a mission, including ingress, approach to the target, attack runs, and egress.

F-15 Strike Eagle III also shares some of the basic features from earlier versions of the game, such as the pre-mission briefings, the prominence of the HUD and other cockpit displays, promotions and awards based on mission performance, the ability to select difficulty levels, and post-mission replays that highlight in-mission events.

The updated Briefing screen is more immersive and life-like than the previous version's similar screen. (Note: Pointing your mouse at the trash can caused the "Reject Mission" prompt to come up. If you clicked on it, the pilot seated on the folding chair - your avatar, if you will - would wad up a sheet of paper and toss it in the wastebasket.) (C) 1992 MicroProse Software

However, the 1992 game broke away from the older games in many important areas, with an emphasis on realism and historical accuracy that made F-15 Strike Eagle III seem less like a video game and more like a dedicated flight simulator that came close to replicating the experience of flying a real Strike Eagle.

For instance, F-15 Strike Eagle III had more of a real-world focus than its two precursors. One of the issues I had with both F-15 Strike Eagle and F-15 Strike Eagle II was the settings of some of the scenarios. I could buy into the Persian Gulf and Middle East Scenarios even before Desert Storm by suspending disbelief and telling myself that those were “possible future conflict” scenarios. The Libya missions I had a tougher time with; I could accept the setting as a future conflict zone, but the conceit that a land-based F-15E took off from an aircraft carrier always bugged the crap out of me. Yes, I played the missions anyway and had fun, but the Eagle-on-a-carrier aspect never failed to annoy me.

But for me, the biggest issue I had with the older versions of F-15 Strike Eagle was that it depicted missions set during the Vietnam War era. The F-15 was not in service during the period of active American participation in Indochina; the plane began its development in the late 1960s when the Air Force determined that it needed an air-superiority fighter to counter the Soviets’ MiG-25 Foxbat, but it did not have its first flight until 1972. Furthermore, it did not enter operational service until 1976, a year after the Vietnam War ended.

The Main Menu window. Here, I have already selected the Panama theater of operations (you can tell from the map). From this screen, you could go to the Briefing (the closed door by the 335th TFS "Chiefs" logo), Quick Start (the F-15E on the hardstand), Reality Settings (the adjacent brick building behind the Wing Commander), or watch MicroProse game promos (the TV/VCR combo). There is also a dropdown Modem/Quit to DOS menu at the top edge of the screen. (C) 1992 MicroProse Software

F-15 Strike Eagle III did away with that bit of anachronistic business. In its place, George Wargo, a retired Air Force pilot and one of the game’s technical advisers, suggested that the game’s action should take place in three theaters: the historical Desert Storm, which was still fresh in the national collective memory, and two possible near-future “major regional conflicts, Korea and Panama.

A look at the new WSO screen. Here, the back-seater's MFDs are set on Air-to-Ground mode; note the FLIR/HUD, radar display, and weapons stations screens. I have just dropped six canisters of CBU-87 bomblets against Colombian Army vehicles in Panama. (C) 1992 MicroProse Software

Another decision Hollis and his team made was to emphasize the reality that the F-15E is a two-seat aircraft rather than a heavily armed one-man fighter. The 1985 original edition of the game alluded to this in the game manual, but the limitations of home computers of the era did not permit Sid Meier to depict a Weapons System Operator (WSO, pronounced “wizzo”) or the rear cockpit in the game itself. F-15 Strike Eagle II did include a “rear view” screen that showed a WSO “behind” the player, who was the “front seat” pilot, but it’s just a cosmetic nod to reality. In F-15 Strike Eagle II, all of the action was in the front cockpit, and players could not “jump” to the back seat and see any of the WSO’s multi-function displays (MFDs). The computing power was simply not there for such details in those days when Intel 386 chips were new and state of the art.

F-15 Strike Eagle III was different. By the time it came out in late 1992, computers with Intel 486 processors or their equivalent were more powerful and could handle more complex programs with better graphics and more versatile AI elements. As a result, Hollis and his team were able to add a WSO feature to the simulation that allowed the player (in single-player mode) to play the roles of both pilot and back-seater by using the appropriate keyboard commands.

A bomb (or missile) for every occasion? (C) MicroProse Software

F-15 Strike Eagle III also emphasized the aircraft’s primary role as a fighter-bomber. It went beyond the two previous games’ limited arsenals (Mark 82 “slick” iron bombs for F-15 Strike Eagle; AGM-65 Maverick missiles for F-15 Strike Eagle II) and allowed players to use every type of conventional ordnance used by the F-15E squadrons in service at the time. Mark 82s and Mavericks were on the menu, so to speak. So were HARM anti-radar missiles, Durandal runway busters, Rockeye cluster bombs, and even Harpoon anti-ship missiles.

There was also more diversity in air-to-air weaponry, as well. The M61 Vulcan 20 mm. cannon is back, of course; that’s the Eagle’s weapon of last resort. Sidewinder heat-seekers have always been part of the franchise’s arsenal, and AIM-7 Sparrows appeared in the original F-15 Strike Eagle game. The AMRAAM (aka “Slammer”) is back from F-15 Strike Eagle II, but now you can swap out the four Sidewinders and replace them with AMRAAMs. Beware, though, the game simulates shortages, especially in Campaign mode, so don’t become too dependent on the Slammer as your air-to-air missile of choice.

External view of my F-15E flying away from a now-bombed "laager" of EE-11 vehicles. Note the text prompt from my WSO's report that our Primary objective was achieved. (In the game's audio track, the WSO, played by George Wargo, simply says "Primary achieved!") (C) 1992 MicroProse Software

Another cool feature that made the game fun and realistic was the use of digitized speech. To simulate some of the radio calls and inter-crew communication, George Wargo used his “Air Force voice” to record replies for information requests from a player’s F-15E to the in-game AWACS plane. When a player pressed the Shift-P combination for “picture,” the AWACS controller (played by Wargo’s voice) would say something like “Clear, 20, 200” (meaning “There’s nothing in the sky at that bearing and distance.” Or, if there was a contact on the AWACS (and the player’s scope or navigation map), the controller would say “Bogey” and give the proper bearing and distance. There were other related phrases from AWACS: “Bandits” referred to planes that were clearly identified as an enemy; friendly planes – such as the KC-10 – were called “chicks.” Other radio voices done by Wargo are the KC-10 pilot and the airbase control tower radio operator sending you off or welcoming you back at the end of a mission.

Wargo also did double duty as the player’s WSO, who often gave the pilot prompts such as “Spike!” (“We’re being illuminated by a radar!”) “Spike Mud!” (“Ground-based radar has a lock on us!”), (“Primary – or Secondary – achieved!”) or the dreaded “Launch! Launch!” (“Someone just shot a missile at us!”)

Yvette Bazell provided the game’s other voice: the Master Caution alarm’s female-voice recording, aka by Air Force pilots as “Bitching Betty.” This is not a voice one wants to hear, especially in a combat simulation. But if your plane is hit by, say, a SAM-2 missile and damages your port engine, Bitching Betty will call your attention with a stern-sounding “Warning: Engine fire left. Warning: Engine fire left.” (Why was the Master Caution voice a feminine one? During the testing process for the aural warning system in the 1960s, researchers discovered that combat pilots, who were exclusively male at the time, will pay more attention to a woman’s voice than to a man’s gruffer vocal qualities.)

Additionally, F-15 Strike Eagle III was one of the first PC flight simulators with multiplayer capability. Via modem or a local access network, two players (each with a copy of the game) could play the game in one of three modes:

1. Collaborative. In this mode, one player took the role of the pilot, while the other played as a “wizzo”

2. Wingman. In this mode, both players flew separate planes but supported each other during a mission

3. Aggressor. Basically, this was “Red Flag” for the computer, in which the two players went head-to-head against each other in an OPFOR training exercise

My Take

When I first played F-15 Strike Eagle III a quarter of a century ago, MicroProse Software was at the zenith of its existence as an independent designer and publisher of computer games and simulations. It had introduced many PC-era gamers to such groundbreaking titles as Silent Service, Sid Meier’s Civilization, and many military-themed flight sims, including F-19 Stealth Fighter and its more accurate follow-on F-117 Stealth Fighter 2.0, Red Storm Rising (a game which many in the F-15 Strike Eagle III team worked on), and, of course, the F-15 Strike Eagle trilogy.

Of the three entries – there was going to be a fourth, but MicroProse’s fortunes changed and many of its prominent staffers left the company, including Hollis, so plans for F-15 Strike Eagle IV were scrapped in the mid-1990s – F-15 Strike Eagle III is the best one.

Why?

Well, mostly because of its team’s commitment to giving players a more realistic game playing experience this time around. I’ve already mentioned the “wizzo” feature that takes you into both seats of an F-15E’s cockpit and the “closer-to-reality” scenarios, so I’ll go ahead and talk about other features that make F-15 Strike Eagle III the masterpiece in the Strike Eagle series.

First, the game allows you to choose between single missions or entire campaigns in each of the three theaters of operations – Desert Storm, Korea, and Panama. On single-mission mode, you fly into combat in a randomly-generated mission that can start either at a forward airbase “in theater” or in the air near a KC-10 Extender aerial tanker. Sometimes you’ll fly at night at a low level, while at other times you’ll fly in daylight in various types of weather. (There are no storms or rain in the game; the limits of 1990s computing power simply did not allow for that level of complexity. But there are varying degrees of cloudiness and visibility). Night-time missions were part of the franchise from the very first game, but the graphics in F-15 Strike Eagle III depict them nicely and with more realism.

Campaigns are a series of interconnected missions that, cumulative, have a ripple effect that determines both your career as an Air Force pilot and the outcome of the war itself. This is similar to the “war career” option in Silent Service II and the Red Storm Rising option in MicroProse’s eponymous game based on Tom Clancy’s novel. If you destroy either the Primary or Secondary target and survive everything the enemy throws at you – including flak, surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), and fighters – you are awarded medals and, every so often, promotion to a higher rank. (You start the game as a second lieutenant; the highest rank you earn as a combat pilot is a colonel, aka “bird colonel.” If you survive various campaigns and earn enough promotions, you are kicked upstairs to a desk job as a brigadier – one-star – general.)

In a campaign, ground targets you hit on Mission One do not miraculously regenerate and reappear undamaged on Mission Two. If you destroy a SAM site in Iraq during the Desert Storm campaign at any stage of an assigned mission, it’s not going to be on the map the next time you take your F-15E over the same area in a subsequent mission. Same goes for more important targets for air-to-mud ordnance. I still have vivid memories of one campaign I flew in back in the early ‘90s. Early in Desert Storm, I was assigned to bomb one of Saddam Hussein’s Presidential Palaces in Baghdad. I did, using an AGM-84E Stand-off Land Attack Missile (SLAM), which blew it up in spectacular pixelated fashion. On a subsequent trip “downtown” to Baghdad, I happened to look “down” at the city and saw a glowing orange “hole” where the palace had been.

Of course, a player’s career can take many turns, not all of them good. In every combat mission, you run the risk of being wounded if your plane gets hit and damaged; enemy aircraft and ground defenses can and – if you are not careful – often do shoot a player’s Strike Eagle out of the sky. Ejection is possible, but you have to do so at certain airspeeds and in level flight, otherwise you “die.” Even then, depending on where you land after parachuting from your plane, you can either be captured or rescued. (Word of advice: too many ejections due to loss-of-aircraft will result in your assignment to a desk job.)

Other obstacles to a successful career are friendly-fire “blue on blue” incidents in which you shoot down your own tanker or bomb your own airbase. In single-player mode these are the only two situations in which “blue-on-blue” incidents take place; although the manual has an aircraft ID chapter full of American and Allied planes that served in Desert Storm and were in service in the 1990s, the only other U.S.-built aircraft (besides your own and the KC-10) you’ll see in-game are either Colombian and Venezuelan aircraft that are your enemies in the Panama campaign. (I’ve only played single-player in the DOS version, so I don’t know if the CD-ROM follow-on shows other friendlies in the air.)

Oh, yes. The game allows you to refuse missions during a Briefing. I sometimes do it if the AIM-120 AMRAAM is temporarily unavailable (the game simulates shortages at the front), but I only use this option sparingly. If you refuse too many missions, the game informs you that your superiors have taken you off flight status and assigned you to a desk – permanently.

As in many other MicroProse games, you can make the game as hard or easy to play as you want. F-15 Strike Eagle III has two options for every realism setting (Standard or Authentic) that controls the sim. In the all-Easy mode, players get a very forgiving flight model, crashing is difficult (but not impossible, multi-function displays (MFDs) are similar to those in F-15 Strike Eagle II and easy to interpret, radars are easy to use and understand, and the sim even lands the plane for you. (The effect is like watching the Enterprise haul in a shuttle to the hangar deck on Star Trek.) At higher levels of realism, the flight model is more authentic, you’ll need to read the manual to interpret the various symbols on your MFDs, radars require more player input, and landings are more realistic.

Obviously, this is a game and not an official Air Force training simulation, so it has features that simplify the flight experience for a gaming experience.

Not only does F-15 Strike Eagle III have difficulty settings that make the simulation easy to use and play, but one can accelerate time (up to eight times game speed) during portions of the mission in which a player is not in imminent danger of running into enemy aircraft or ground defenses.

F-15 Strike Eagle III also simplifies modern air combat by portraying the missions as one (or two in modem/LAN mode) aircraft against an entire enemy country. In later games, such as Andy Hollis’ own Jane’s F-15, which some fans call F-15 Strike Eagle IV, game designers have added wingmen or even entire four-plane flights to add more authenticity to the aerial combat experience.

This convention is as old as video gaming itself, and it can be excused because at the time PCs were not as powerful as a typical Windows 8/10 computer in the 21^st Century. Still, it’s a shame that Hollis and his team apparently planned to incorporate more AI-controlled friendly aircraft in the game but were hobbled by the realities of the state of tech in 1992. (I mean, seriously; if you read the manual that came with the original DOS version, you will see that the Aircraft and Weapons section has drawings and specs for planes that are not in the game.)

To review this game by 21^st Century standards is, of course, unfair, especially when it comes to such things as the realism – or lack thereof – of the graphics and sound. Clearly, the look of the game has not aged well; enemy planes don’t have a lot of fine detail even in the highest graphics setting; Hollis’ team lavished almost all of their resources on the F-15E itself; all of the environments and enemy aircraft, ships, and ground vehicles have that “Early 1990s Video Game Look” that was amazing in its time but now looks simplistic and “cartoony.”

So, Dear Reader, I won’t do that. It’s silly to criticize a game that was hailed as one of the best in its genre in 1992 and judge it by the same standards as, say, Locked On.

What I will do, though, is to praise F-15 Strike Eagle III for taking a game that was known for its playability and “fun factor” and making it into a simulation that came close to giving players a taste of what flying a complex fighter-bomber in the 1990s was like. Within the bounds of the technology then available, it was extremely realistic. Lots of care went into creating the environment in which F-15 Strike Eagle III flew; cities, specific buildings, and all kinds of military installations were in their real-life locations, and some of them, including Panama City and Baghdad, had recognizable features, both natural and man-made, that made them identifiable as being real-world places rather than generic computer game settings.

For a sim designed over a quarter century ago, F-15 Strike Eagle III was, and still is, a true classic in its genre. It was fun to play, sure, but it was also challenging and nerve-racking, especially once you began to tweak the various settings from Easy mode to Authentic. It took me about eight months to make the transition from “flying” exclusively on Easy mode to mostly Authentic; I got as far as having seven out of 10 reality settings on Authentic before I bought a PC that lacked the 5.25-inch floppy drive necessary to boot up the game and had to stop playing F-15 Strike Eagle III. I tried setting the radars on Authentic mode once but found that it was really difficult to learn the fine points of using the Eagle’s air-to-air and air-to-ground radar, so I just switched back to the Easy setting.

I also tried flying the F-15E on Authentic flight model mode, but I was so used to the easy-peasy “video game” flight one that I gave up after only 10 minutes. The F-15 “felt” heavy and responded sluggishly to my keyboard (and, close to the end of my F-15 gaming days, a Thrustmaster joystick). This, of course, was because the plane had full weapons and fuel loadout; the manual said that once you had expended your ordnance and burned away some of the fuel, the sim would start reacting like its “interceptor” mode and react faster and more nimbly. Now, almost 23 years later, I regret not trying again.

(I also regret not getting the CD-ROM version in 1994, but it was pricey and not that easy to find in Miami in those pre-Amazon years. Plus, I was busy with other things at the time. So there’s that.)

If you were to ask me which of my old DOS games I would like to see on Steam or Good Old Games (GOG.com), my most likely reply would be F-15 Strike Eagle III. Of all the games that I played in the 1990s and don’t have a 21^st Century follow-up, that’s the one I miss playing the most.

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Classic PC Game Review: MicroProse's 'F-15 Strike Eagle III'

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