Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aces High General Discussion => Topic started by: mussie on January 23, 2007, 06:13:52 AM
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I had someone say they have been playing these games since 1985 today...
I thought it all stated in the early 90's...
When was the first Online Multiplayer flight sim....?
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AirWarrior is regarded as the first On-Line flightsim...started about 1987 or so.
Air Warrior on Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Warrior)
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How come I never heard about this? That was a year before I was born. Did it run on the Commodore Amiga, or did it use Qbasic?
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Originally posted by Benny Moore
How come I never heard about this? That was a year before I was born. Did it run on the Commodore Amiga, or did it use Qbasic?
Aww Crap... I felt old before... Now I feel really old
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Originally posted by Benny Moore
How come I never heard about this? That was a year before I was born. Did it run on the Commodore Amiga, or did it use Qbasic?
I have T-shirts older than this player :rofl
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Originally posted by Benny Moore
How come I never heard about this? That was a year before I was born. Did it run on the Commodore Amiga, or did it use Qbasic?
You were too young. Air Warrior launched on AOHell in '96 or thereabouts and was available in both a Macintosh and PC version. I played the former and recall a BUSY night being 25 - 30 peeps. It was very primitive - a 2 dimentional graphics engine but a blast to play. The flight models were pretty good and get this...head-on shots were rarely if at all, recognized by the FE.
At which point Kesmai (AW developers) was bought out by Rupert Murdoch's New Corp, the Macintosh version was put to death and the PC side flourished with the release of Air Warrior 3D. Enter Electronic Arts, who basically took a little cash cow and plundered it into oblivion....just as Hitech & Pyro were greasing the early wheels of AH.
Those were some fun times
:cry
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I think Max is getting old, as I remember playing AW on GEnie in 1990-1.
I think I was in the first wave of the TTD..Ten Thousand Dweebs..you know,
the ones that ruined AW for the original fossils :D
The AOL release was sort of the same thing for guys like me...till I came
over to AH in 2001 to ruin it for the beta/early AHers :aok
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Originally posted by Rino
I think Max is getting old, as I remember playing AW on GEnie in 1990-1.
Listen here you dolt, all I said was that it launched on AOL around '06. Think it first went "live" in '86-'87.
No burgers for you! :rofl
And yes, Max is getting old. :cry
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I started with Air Warrior in '96 on AOL but i think it had been around about 10 years before that. The community took a big hit when AOL dropped it and it transitioned to AWII then another on the transition to AWIII.
AWIII was sort-lived and most of the remaining AW community migrated here on it's demise in about 2001.
Those days in AWI on AOL were a lot of fun.
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Originally posted by Benny Moore
How come I never heard about this? That was a year before I was born. Did it run on the Commodore Amiga, or did it use Qbasic?
It ran on the Amiga and the Atari ST in '87. It probably ran on the Mac too but I don't remember. I used an ST. Genie (General Electric News and Information Service, a freestanding non-internet dialup service) was the host network - it cost about $5/hr to play as I recall. AHII is a steal compared to that.
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Originally posted by Irwink!
It ran on the Amiga and the Atari ST in '87. It probably ran on the Mac too but I don't remember. I used an ST. Genie (General Electric News and Information Service, a freestanding non-internet dialup service) was the host network - it cost about $5/hr to play as I recall. AHII is a steal compared to that.
Yup, worked on a Mac, too. $6 per hour. At a screamin rate of 1200 baud. 1st "camp" was late '87.
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Originally posted by Max
Enter Electronic Arts, who basically took a little cash cow and plundered it into oblivion
AW was dying long before EA or NewsCorp came around...
ack-ack
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I used to play this vector graphics based game on the commodore 64 called twin tornado, which could use a RS232 cable to link it to another C64 and you could play against your mate in 2 player fights. That was back in like 1986? Not really 'online' tho.
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Originally posted by Spatula
I used to play this vector graphics based game on the commodore 64 called twin tornado, which could use a RS232 cable to link it to another C64 and you could play against your mate in 2 player fights. That was back in like 1986? Not really 'online' tho.
Reminds me of AceII on the C64....
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Originally posted by mussie
Reminds me of AceII on the C64....
Oh yer :) Love that music for that game too. You can download this app called SidPlay (i think) and then download these sound pack files which have all the music from every C64 game ever :D endless fun.
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Originally posted by Benny Moore
How come I never heard about this? That was a year before I was born. Did it run on the Commodore Amiga, or did it use Qbasic?
Qbasic...
now that's funny...
:D
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Originally posted by storch
I have T-shirts older than this player :rofl
My underwear is older than this player.
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HISTORY OF AIR WARRIOR (by Brooke)
Air Warrior started as a program written by Kelton Flynn back
when he was working on his Ph.D. (in nuclear engineering or
physics, as I recall). It didn't bear much resemblance to the
Air Warrior of today -- you'd type in maneuvers for your plane;
your opponent would type in maneuvers for his plane; the computer
would crunch some numbers and come up with new plane positions;
and so on. It was played over terminals on the school's
mainframe. Kelton got a lot more interested in this and decided
after graduation (along with one of his pals -- I think it was
John Taylor) to found a company to produce a multi-player flight
sim. So Kesmai was formed, and Air Warrior was conceived.
Kesmai started out with all of a couple of employees.
To implement Air Warrior, Kesmai hooked up with GEnie, a new
on-line service at the time. Air Warrior came out in 1987 and
was the first multi-player combat flight simulator (at least
outside of the military). Back then it cost $10 or $12 per hour
to play and was available only for Macintoshes. That was in the
days when Macs had the little nine-inch black-and-white screens
and no joysticks. Still, I remember what a blast it was to find
such a thing in those days: an honest-to-God multi-player combat
flight sim!
That first version of Air Warrior was pretty rough by today's
standards. The frame rate was low (perhaps a handful of frames
per second, depending on which type of computer you had), rough
black-and-white graphics, bullets that flew on laser-beam
straight paths, and wacky bugs (like being able to climb to the
stratosphere as long as your plane was climbing while inverted).
But there was nothing else like it out there. Keep in mind that
Air Warrior was out only a handful of years after the original
Flight Simulator by Bruce Artwick of SubLogic, when the best
PC-based flight sims in the world didn't have much more than Air
Warrior in the way of graphics and had no multi-player component
at all. For people like me -- raving WWII aviation enthusiasts
-- this was a dream come true.
As the years chugged on, the Air-Warrior program was refined
(adding more realistic gunnery and getting rid of flight-dynamics
bugs), and the program was ported to the Atari and Amiga
computers. Of course, folks at Kesmai knew that they were
missing a big market in the PC and announced their plans for a
DOS-based EGA version for the PC. Jeez, did that ever start the
comments flowing on GEnie's Air-Warrior message boards. Lots of
people were concerned that the PC folks would swarm into the
arenas, flooding the arenas to overflowing with dweebs who didn't
know how to fly. There would go the neighborhood. Maybe it was
a little like that at first (not as much challenge for the old
folks), but then the PC folks learned the ropes just like
everyone else had, and the game had more participants, which
added to the fun.
Scenarios were also introduced into the mix of fun. Pioneered by
guys like Doktor Gonzo (or "Dok"), these were battles set up with
definite objectives and resources. To me, playing in a
historical scenario gave the same feeling I got when reading
about real WWII air combat. To me, scenarios seemed like a whole
new level of fun in Air Warrior.
But then came the "stagnant" years. Kesmai continued to make
minor refinements, but some people had been asking for more
realism or more features for a long time, and Kesmai wasn't
giving much feedback. Previously, Kesmai had given lots of
feedback and had talked to the players a lot about proposed
improvements and new versions. Without the feedback, a lot of us
figured that Air Warrior was stagnating, that Kesmai was more
interested in producing other games that perhaps brought in more
money. A lot of the old timers thought that this was the
beginning of the end for Air Warrior, the start of a slow decline
into obscurity.
What we didn't know was that Kesmai was working on a vastly
improved version, the SVGA version for DOS. Besides much higher
resolution and better graphics, it would have most of the realism
features that had asked for over the years: stalls, spins,
blackouts, etc. There would be accompanying changes in the
on-line arenas. Kesmai hadn't talked about it at all, though,
because they were tired of the players constantly asking, "When
will it be out? You said it would be out in two weeks. It's
past two weeks, so when will it be out, huh? When?" That gets
old very fast during a development process.
So, to the surprise of many, Kesmai came out with the new SVGA
version, which fairly closely resembled the versions available
today. The Mac version was updated, too. About that time, the
Atari ST and Amiga were declining into obscurity, and Kesmai
dropped their support for those platforms. SVGA Air Warrior,
with its up-to-date features, generated some interest from the
retail market, and Kesmai entered into a deal to market it in
stores. Unfortunately, that petered out due (it seemed to me) to
poor distribution on the part of the distribution company (not
Kesmai) and to a game that was not tailored to the ham-fisted "I
want eye candy" arcade-game crowd (which seems larger than the
rabid "I want realism" WWII air-combat-enthusiast crowd).
However, this blip on the retail market might have contributed to
Air Warrior being noticed by a Japanese company. The company
invested a bit in Air Warrior, paying for the addition of artwork
and data sets for some of the Japanese planes. At any rate,
things were back to humming along in Air Warrior.
The Air-Warrior Training Academy started sometime around 1993 or
1994. A bunch of the veteran players, knowing how steep the
learning curve was for Air Warrior, wanted to help new players
get up to speed more quickly. Also, Kesmai entered into deals
with two other on-line services -- Delphi and CRIS -- to offer
Air Warrior. Players liked this because it introduced some price
competition into the mix. GEnie had already dropped its on-line
charges from $10-$12/hour to $6/hour. Now, with the extra
competition, it went to something like $3/hour. I think that
Kesmai was finally starting to make some money, too, because it
hired a lot more people, many of them from the ranks of avid
Air-Warrior players.
So, the Training Academy was up and running. Air Warrior was
running on GEnie, Delphi, and CRIS. Scenarios were humming
along. The cost for Air Warrior declined to $2/hour and less.
Things were great. And then, in 1996, they got even better,
although in an erratic way. Kesmai made a deal with CompuServe,
America Online, and Earthlink to offer Air Warrior on their
services; and GEnie, long the most popular spot for Air Warrior,
pretty much went belly up (due, in my opinion, to very poor
management and to being far behind the technology curve).
Overall, Kesmai now had a much larger market because of the size
of America Online and CompuServe, but for a couple of reasons,
there was a lot of disruption in late 1996 and early 1997.
First, the demise of GEnie as THE place for Air Warrior caused a
scattering of the Air-Warrior community and a momentary halt in
scenarios and the Training Academy. It was sad to see all of the
old timers scattering to the winds, and some seemed to drift off
altogether during this time of change. (Sniff, sniff.) There
was even another Air-Warrior-like product out there: ICI's
WarBirds, written in part by Air-Warrior veterans HiTech,
Caligula, and Pyro. This drew off some Air-Warrior players, too,
but competition is a very good thing for us consumers. Second,
Kesmai rapidly developed successive new versions of Air Warrior
that, because of improvements, were incompatible with other
versions; and Kesmai dropped some of the older versions. During
1996, they released Air Warrior for Windows, Air Warrior for
Windows 95, and a corresponding beta version for the Macintosh.
In January, 1997, they dropped support for SVGA Air Warrior and
the SVGA-style Mac version. In late February, 1997, they
released Air Warrior II for Windows 95.
The incompatibilities lead to a fragmentation of the Air-Warrior
universe. The current situation is that there are four separate
sets of arenas: one set for Air Warrior II on Delphi, Earthlink,
and CompuServe; one for Air Warrior for Windows on Delphi,
Earthlink, and CompuServe; one for Air Warrior for Windows on
America Online; and one for the beta version of Air Warrior for
the Mac. Thus, users on Delphi, Earthlink, and CompuServe who
use Air Warrior II can play together in a scenario; but people
using Air Warrior for Windows, Air Warrior for the Mac, or
playing on America Online can't participate in the same scenario
since their arenas are separate.
Still, despite such fragmentation, the future of Air Warrior
looks brighter than ever mainly because popularity is higher than
ever. I think that Kesmai is finally starting to make a decent
amount of money from Air Warrior -- and more money encourages
more development. Air Warrior II is out and selling in stores;
the Air-Warrior Training Academy is getting back up to speed; war
nights are up and running; and I hear rumors of more frequent
scenarios. I hope that a new Air-Warrior community will form
around the "alt.games.air-warrior" newsgroup, where people can
participate no matter which arenas they fly in.
So, after writing all of this, after having thought back to those
days a decade ago when first I took to Air Warrior's virtual
skies, I am left with many thoughts. Three stand out: first,
that Air Warrior has progressed so far over the years; second,
that compared to the old days, Air Warrior is so cheap to play;
and third, that if it had been this way back in 1987, I never
would have graduated.
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The full history
http://www.virtualpilots.fi/feature/articles/simhistory/
Regards
wipass
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Originally posted by Brooke
HISTORY OF AIR WARRIOR (by Brooke)
Air Warrior started as a program written by Kelton Flynn back
when he was working on his Ph.D. (in nuclear engineering or
physics, as I recall).
~~~~SNIP~~~~
Air Warrior is so cheap to play;
and third, that if it had been this way back in 1987, I never
would have graduated.
Aw hell Brooke...
I love the way you never seam to do things by halves...
What else can I say but and thanks for the info..
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Originally posted by Spatula
Oh yer :) Love that music for that game too. You can download this app called SidPlay (i think) and then download these sound pack files which have all the music from every C64 game ever :D endless fun.
On the local college station KDVS they have the C64 hour where people make songs on the c64 and get to play em....it's funny to say the least, like mario bro's on bad acid after a long night of drinking gasoline.
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Originally posted by lagger86
On the local college station KDVS they have the C64 hour where people make songs on the c64 and get to play em....it's funny to say the least, like mario bro's on bad acid after a long night of drinking gasoline.
Oh my, thats brilliant :) would love to hear some.
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I miss those days. $12/hr. Went to all the conventions that were in Houston. FlushGarden, if I remember correctly, and his frustrating 51 runs on our radar. You could NEVER catch him. I killed Dok once in his Fw 190 when he was busy on someone else. His ELO was above 1500. If you remember ELO then you were there in the beginning.
I had the first Color Mac running AW at one of the conventions. Kelton was slightly jealous. Made a lot of online friends back then. I no longer remember most of their names. And there were plenty of others that you loved to hate.
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Originally posted by Ack-Ack
AW was dying long before EA or NewsCorp came around...
ack-ack
not how I remember it, I blame EA
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Originally posted by Brooke
HISTORY OF AIR WARRIOR (by Brooke)
~snip~
Damn Your an Old Fart !
:D
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Wasn't AW only available on Compuserve?
It wouldn't run on my Vic-20, so I had to buy a Commodore 64 and then an Amiga in 87and THEN I bought an IBM in 91.
Ahhh, those were the days... remember waiting for MS DOS 5.0? The excitement of configuring our Gravis soundcards with Rolands?
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Originally posted by Mister Fork
Wasn't AW only available on Compuserve?
It wouldn't run on my Vic-20, so I had to buy a Commodore 64 and then an Amiga in 87and THEN I bought an IBM in 91.
Ahhh, those were the days... remember waiting for MS DOS 5.0? The excitement of configuring our Gravis soundcards with Rolands?
It was originally only on GEnie, and ran only on Macs. Then Atari ST's and Amigas were added, then finally PC's.
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Originally posted by Heater
Damn Your an Old Fart !
:D
From campaign #2 in Air Warrior, seems someone was already getting started. :)
Scores as of 13:06EST 03/03/88
Rank, Score, Country, Ship, Handle
.
.
.
162, 3571, B, 686, Heater
.
.
.
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Damn Brooke, did you keep all of that ****.......:rofl
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Originally posted by Heater
Damn Brooke, did you keep all of that ****.......:rofl
Heh! Actually, I do wish I had saved all of it, but it was from someone else (Tim "Blackhawk" Melton) who had saved it.
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I'm glad that AWII release has been mentioned. It settles in my mind when I first got started.
I was playing a PC game called Fighter Aces that I came across at Wal-mart on a Pentium 166 with Win3.1. I just got and ISP and was leaning to surf the net when I came across a place called Gamestorm. It had an Online flight sim called Air Warrior but it required Win95!. It looked interesting and I went out and bought Win95 to the dismay of my geek buddies. (win95 was the devil's work, at the time)
Thus began my fun in AW and my education in IT.
I fininshed my 10,000 point training in AW(1) and entered the MA as a fully fledged Dweebus!. Then AW became AWII and everything changed!
It is now my official 10th annaversary in online Gaming. It has been A great Journey.
As fun and good as AW WAS, it would have been surpassed at some point.
We were lucky that Dale and crew came along when they did and they were lucky in their timing on the release of Aces High. EA really missed the boat when they went to India. AWTC knows what I mean.
If you think about it, everyone made some prediction about Online gaming, and everyone has been right.
There are still the people who enjoy the game for fun and entertainment, for freindship and comaradery.
There are still quite a few that believe that when the Army,Navy or Air Force make the transition to R/C war machines, they will have proved themselves worthy by being #1 rank.
And there are the few who just are unbelievably good at computer gameplay.
The Vets will still train the noobs and the noobs will still teach the Vets a thing or two.
As long as it is fun, it is worth the price.
SALUTE to all the players.
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Originally posted by Mister Fork
It wouldn't run on my Vic-20
Vic-20 - jeez, now you're showing your age.
Did you have the Gorf cartridge?
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1962 spacewars was played between Mit, Ucla and Rit. max of 6 players before system crashed. Planes, tanks.......................T hank god for Al Gore
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Originally posted by rod367th
1962 spacewars was played between Mit, Ucla and Rit. max of 6 players before system crashed. Planes, tanks.......................T hank god for Al Gore
:huh And I thought you were taking the Pi$$
http://www.historicaltextarchive.com/s/video-games.php (http://www.historicaltextarchive.com/s/video-games.php)
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Originally posted by mussie
:huh And I thought you were taking the Pi$$
http://www.historicaltextarchive.com/s/video-games.php (http://www.historicaltextarchive.com/s/video-games.php)
rod367th <-------------------Cliff calven from cheers
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Originally posted by Max
Listen here you dolt, all I said was that it launched on AOL around '06. Think it first went "live" in '86-'87.
No burgers for you! :rofl
And yes, Max is getting old. :cry
Cool but AOL wasnt known as AOL on 86.
It was then known a QLink.
QLink was a dialup setup you used to ohave to pay for by the hour. to play AW it was another per hour charge (premium)
I know cause back then I wanted to play. but coudnt afford to