It makes me feel old to talk about this, but then, I am old. :-) I flew Air Warrior on the first campaign ever, along with Dok Gonzo and several others whose names I would recall if I looked at some of the old score files. I still have them saved on floppy disks somewhere. I remember a lot of names, but don't remember who all was there on the very first campaign right now except the two of us.
Those were the days of the Amiga and Mac and Atari ST. PC's couldn't cut it yet. I started playing on an Amiga 1000 with 256K, not M, but K of memory, and booting from floppy disk. I logged in on one of the first nights of Air Warrior existence using a 1200 baud modem on the GEnie network, paying $6.00/hour. The Internet was just a twinkle in Al Gore's eyes at that time. The handle I picked came from a combination of Air Warrior and Amiga merged together to form Airmigan.
Accurate flight modeling was not a reality. I remember very clearly taking a P-38 into a vertical climb, running out of upward momentum, and falling backwards, tail first, firing the laser guns at the target above me. Bullets didn't fall with gravity. They went in a straight line.
I heard some of you talk about big bills. I don't know what the record was for the largest monthly bill, but I do recall a couple over $1000.00 that I paid. I was rolling in money back then and it was excessive I know, but I enjoyed every dime of it.
GEnie was $6.00/hour for non-primetime, i.e. 5:00 PM to 8:00 AM and $12.00/hour during primetime. I remember logging quite a few primetime hours but most of the time I would try to get home from work at 4:30 PM or so and get set up so I was dialing GEnie at 4:59:45 PM and would connect just as the rate changed to non-primetime. Now THAT was addiction.
We flew at half-time. That means everyting took twice as long to happen. If you were flying at 250 knots, you were actually not going somewhere at that rate of speed but half of it. I think it was because the modems couldn't keep us updated at full-speed enough to make it playable. It was quite some time before technology advanced and Kesmai ever offered a full-time arena, and it quickly became very popular.
I have to give credit to the father of Air Warrior, Kelton Flynn. He founded Kesmai and wrote the first versions of Air Warrior. Even though it was crude, there was nothing like it anywhere, and for a WWII warbird buff like me and several others, it was pure heaven. He had a hell of a job to do, running the company, writing code for the next version, and putting up with the shenanigans that went on in the game. I remember he would get quite flustered when people didn't play the game like it was intended and used loopholes to "cheat". My hat is off to him for starting it all rolling.
I could go on for hours here but I've already written a tome. And I know I've forgotten probably more than I can remember. Dok has a lot better memory than I do and when we finally met several years later at a Houston convention, we sat and talked a while and several times he would make me say, "Oh yeah, I remember that." I enjoyed those conventions thoroughly, hashing the past with guys I'd flown with for months or years and finally meeting them face to face. I hope to make the next Aces High convention in Dallas and seeing some of my old buds again. Whether I do or not, I will never forget the experiences of my tour of duty in Air Warrior. It was one of the best times of my life.
-Airmigan-
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