Flight Simulation

Systems are the content. Lift and drag respond to airspeed and attitude, instruments read from the simulated state rather than from a heads-up display, and a flight consists of checklists, navigation between real airfields, radio procedure and a landing that either works or does not. Failure is rarely dramatic; it is being lost, low on fuel, or descending at a rate the airframe will not forgive.

subLOGIC's product line reached IBM personal computers as Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 in 1982, though the lineage runs back further, through earlier subLOGIC releases on 8-bit home machines and flight models written for mainframes. Choosing an unscored simulation was partly a hardware argument: drawing a wireframe world and integrating flight equations consumed everything the machine had, leaving nothing for adversaries or scoring systems.

Simulation as its own reward established a whole branch of the medium, with a hardware ecosystem of yokes and pedals and an audience that treats fidelity as the review criterion. That audience is also a constraint, because every increase in realism narrows the potential player base. Its tradition has survived through study-level products and by supplying the flight models that action games then simplify for everyone else.