Old Gamers Never Die: Remembering MicroProse Software's 'F-15 Strike Eagle III'

Actual screenshot of the "main title" sequence animation from F-15 Strike Eagle III. The graphics in the game itself are not that detailed; PCs didn't have the computing muscle back then to create that level of visual depth and realism. (C) 1992 MicroProse Software

In March of 1993, shortly after my 30th birthday and a year after I bought my first MS-DOS-based personal computer (PC), I visited the Babbage's store at Miami International Mall to find the Desert Storm upgrade of MicroProse's F-15 Strike Eagle II combat flight simulator. Released in 1991 and co-designed by Sid (Civilization) Meier and Andy Hollis, the sequel to the original 1985 video game was a fun and exciting upgrade, but it sacrificed a great deal of realism to favor ease of play and to take into account the limits of late 1980s-early '90s PCs.


I wasn't a dedicated gamer, so even though I received mailings from MicroProse because I used to register my games with each purchase, I usually threw them in the trash.  As a result, I didn't know that F-15 Strike Eagle II had been phased out a few months earlier and superseded by a DOS-based sequel, F-15 Strike Eagle III. So imagine my surprise when, after asking one of the Babbage's sales clerks for the updated F-15 Strike Eagle game, he presented me with this:

The packaging for the third - and final - entry in the F-15 Strike Eagle series. (C) 1992 MicroProse Software

"Is this what you were looking for?" he asked.


My jaw dropped. I wasn't expecting that, not really. But whatever disappointment I felt at not finding the upgraded version of F-15 Strike Eagle II vanished when I saw the box for the new and improved version of my favorite flight simulator.


The game, I learned, had been published just three months before, the clerk told me. "I've played it a few times myself," he said. "It's fun, but it's a bit more complicated to play than F-15 Strike Eagle II because it's more realistic."


I looked at the price: $49.99, plus sales tax. I had just enough money with me (this was shortly before I started using credit cards) because I'd gotten paid by a client the day before. I also had my Babbage's Repeat Customer card with enough purchase points racked up to get a $10 dollar discount at the register.


Because I bought the original release version, the installation and game files came in 3.5-inch floppy discs. If I recall correctly, the disc-install edition came with four diskettes, a manual, a quick reference card, plus an authentic unit patch from the 335th Tactical Fighter Squadron, one of the three F-15E Strike Eagle squadrons assigned to the 4th Tactical Air Wing at Seymour Johnson AFB in North Carolina. (And, like many graphics-heavy games for DOS, it required you to make a bootup disc with a blank 5.25-inch floppy diskette.) As an added bonus, MicroProse included a fully-illustrated nonfiction handbook about the F-15E Strike Eagle.


I'm not gonna bore you with a long account of how I installed the game or playtested it. Suffice it to say that I followed the instruction manual's directions to the letter, ran through the step-by-step tutorial, and learned the basics of the game before setting off to do "real" missions.

More than just an upgrade

Even before I booted up the game for the first time, I learned that F-15 Strike Eagle III was more than just a cosmetic upgrade to the first two games in the series. Where F-15 Strike Eagle and its first iteration of the 1991 sequel had stuck to the same theaters of operation (Libya, Middle East, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf (against Iran, not Iraq), F-15 Strike Eagle III depicted the historical Desert Storm campaign of early 1991, and two theoretical campaigns, Panama and Korea.


The manual to F-15 Strike Eagle III had a chapter devoted to each scenario. The Desert Storm one, of course, was based on the real Persian Gulf War and discussed the various elements of the air war, such as targets, enemy defenses, enemy aircraft, and the basic tactics used by coalition airmen during Desert Storm. 

The other fictional scenarios were treated in a similar manner, although I always found it difficult to imagine Colombia and Venezuela joining forces to challenge the U.S. for control of Panama. The Korea scenario was written as a sequel of sorts to Desert Storm; its story was centered about Saddam Hussein's efforts to sell a hidden nuke to North Korea, and the Stalinist nation's violent response to the seizure of the North Korean cargo vessel and its precious, deadly cargo by U.S. Navy vessels on the high seas.

The Main Menu screen. Here, you can see which Theater of Operations I've chosen (Panama); the TV/VCR combo shows players short promos for other MicroProse games (Gunship 2000, Task Force 1942, F-117A Nighthawk, and B-17 Flying Fortress) that were available in 1992 or were "coming soon." 

The game assigns players (either in single- or multiple player modes) to the 335th TFS at Seymour Johnson AFB in North Carolina. In each scenario, though, the "Chiefs" are not Stateside; players begin missions either already in the air at a KC-10 Extender tanker or (depending on the level of realism/difficulty) on the ground at a forward-deployed base in-theater. There, because the F-15E is a fighter-bomber and not an interceptor, the player has to fly "air-to-mud" missions against a wide array of targets on both land and sea. Air combat is part of the Strike Eagle's mission profile, of course, and the simulation gives players a mix of weapons - a Vulcan 20 mm. cannon, two types of medium-range missiles, and heat-seeking Sidewinders - for defense against enemy aircraft.


Unlike F-15 Strike Eagle and its first sequel, F-15 Strike Eagle III gave players a variety of bombs and ground attack missiles to arm their aircraft with. Whereas the first game limited players to dropping Mark-82 bombs and the second one only allowed the use of Maverick AGM-65 missiles against enemy targets, F-15 Strike Eagle III gave pilots a complete arsenal of the Air Force's conventional air-to-ground inventory.

In F-15 Strike Eagle III, players can arm their aircraft with a wide array of bombs and missiles used by real Strike Eagle fighter-bombers. (C) 1992 MicroProse Software

Though far from being perfect, F-15 Strike Eagle III was pretty good for a game of its era. Sure, it had its flaws; you needed a powerful PC to run it, a bootup disc to get it started, and graphics that were sometimes only marginally better than those of the earlier F-15 Strike Eagle II:

Though the various types of adversary planes have just a tad more detail than the ones in F-15 Strike Eagle II, the sky, ground, and sea have a more "real world" look that was stunning back in the day. (C) 1992 MicroProse Software

F-15 Strike Eagle III, in its single-player mode, was a fun game to play if you had some spare time, a good computer with a fast processor and enough RAM to run it. You could make it as realistic as you wanted (there were different realism settings for almost every aspect of the game, including the flight model, weapons-effects, multi-function display (MFD) graphics, and take-offs/landings), so players had a wide range of gaming experiences with the sim. It had limits, of course; like most flight sims of the period, in the single-player mode, F-15 Strike Eagle III depicted aerial combat as a one plane-vs.-the enemy. The only friendly aircraft I ever saw in the game, other than my own in exterior views, was the KC-10A Extender tanker in the Desert Storm scenario.

There was some "invisible" friendly support from an AWACS plane; if I pressed Shift-P (for "picture"), a male controller would say something like "Snap, 200, 20." This means, in Air Force speak, "There's an enemy fighter coming your way, distance 20, bearing 200 degrees." But even though the manual came with a section of aircraft identification drawings that included Allied planes, unless you played the game in multi-player mode, you never saw any other U.S. combat planes during a mission.



Still, F-15 Strike Eagle III was fun and challenging. The graphics - especially the in-game ones - were sometimes only marginally better than those of its predecessor, F-15 Strike Eagle II, with most of the improvements going to the detailed rendering of the F-15E's cockpit. Enemy planes and targets were drawn more accurately in F-15 Strike Eagle III, but the computing power of an Intel 386 processor or its 486 follow-on chip simply did not allow the game's artists to render the planes as realistic as those in Ubisoft's Locked On.


I was only able to play this game for a few years; I tended to upgrade my computers every few years to take advantage of technological advances in computers, so when PC manufacturers swapped out the 5.25-inch drives on new models for state-of-the-art CD-ROMs, I couldn't figure out a way to install it. I heard there was a CD-ROM edition, but it was pricey and hard to find. I don't recall when, exactly, I was the last time that played the game from the copy I owned; it was probably around 1995 because by 1996 I had no PC with an A: drive for 5.25-inch floppies.

Happily, I recently found a site where I can play F-15 Strike Eagle III in my spare time. It's hard to do without the manual or the reference card; there are a lot of keyboard commands to remember, and even though I remember most of them, I get "killed" easily in some situations because I've forgotten a lot of the function/view commands. I know the info is available somewhere online; I just need to find the time to look for it.