A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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! F-15 Strike Eagle was the first sim in the series. (C) 1985 MicroProse Software 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 al...

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...