Hello my friends, and welcome to this latest episode of Retro Dogfight! I first have to make an apology. There was a heat wave going on in Los Angeles as we recorded this, so I had a fan going directly on me. I tried my best to hide it, but you can hear it a little bit whenever I talk, so, apologies on that.
For the actual episode itself, welcome to the first episode in which we talk about only one sim! The legendary:
Which came out in 1988 for the Amiga. Now, I never owned an Amiga, but both Chase and Denny were deep, deep, deep into the Amiga ecosphere, so not only are they very familiar with this sim, they take us on something of a deep dive into the history of the Amiga itself.
Now, never having owned an Amiga myself, I was fascinated to hear all this history about the meteoric rise and similarly quick fall of this legendary series of computers. I hope you find it as enlightening as I did.
Oh, and don’t worry, we also discuss the sim.
Next time on the show, we’re gonna kind of stay in-theme. F/A-18 Interceptor was conceived by a bloke called Robert Dinnerman, who went on to create and produce most of the entries in the long-running Jetfighter series.
So, in what will surely be a feat for us, we’ll be discussing the entirety of the Jetfighter series in the next episode. It’ll be a fascinating discussion, as it’s something of a time capsule covering late 80s and 90s flight sim gaming.
So, thank you so much for listening. We hope you enjoy the show, and we’ll see you next time!
PS. We’re going to record a Q&A! You can use the contact form or the Discord or the comment form to ask us questions!
*You can find the Amiga books we discussed here.
*Cover provided by MobyGames
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:00:27 — 41.5MB)
Loved the detour about the Amiga/PC war! I didn’t know it existed.
About questions for the next program: which are your best, or proudest, or most cherished moments in flight sims?
Thanks all for the podcast!
The only way I was aware of it was because I was heavily involved in local BBS boards at the time, and it was a huge topic there.
Thanks for the question!
F/A-18 Interceptor, when I was at EA, became my project as an assistant producer. Under the producer, Stewart Bonn, it was a pilot rescue game, rescuing downed pilots off the coast of San Francisco, and while it was a high frame-rate sim, the missions were very . Moses Ma was Bob’s agent, and my contact. I was frustrated that the scenarios were very “thin” and brought that up to Moses.
I felt the game needed to be a combat sim (my dream games) and asked the Moses to let me help add the features needed to make the change. Moses explained to me in no uncertain terms this would not happen. He and Bob were devout pacifists, and wouldn’t make a game depicting violence. I discussed this with my boss, (Richard Hilleman) who suggested I make my case directly with Bob. I sent Bob a design doc explaining the basics of how the HUD for weapons works, and suggested the combat game could be a much bigger hit. Dinnerman immediately agreed, and expressed zero qualms about the “violence”, so the boulder rolled downhill from there. My relationship with Moses Ma was essentially broken at that point, since he was “out of the loop” after that, and I assume I’d damaged his relationship with Bob as well, but I don’t know. That’d come up later when Moses “kidnapped” our amiga version milestone and held it for ransom in our PC version contract negotiation – which died – and the game was later released as “Jetfighter”. Moses claimed it didn’t use our code, but of course we knew it did, the Amiga OS text strings (“Put disk in Drive DF0 and press Enter”) were in the PC libraries. Too funny!
OMG what a lovely post that explains so much. Thank you so much!
Now here’s the kind of stuff we old sim-heads live for. Thanks, Paul!
Wow, that’s a nice story. Really interesting to hear such insights, especially from someone like Paul Grace who also produced many of my beloved flight sims (LHX, CYAC, USNF etc.). You could clearly see the JetFighter having Interceptor’s code – they were basically the same game under the hood.
Right? I am loving learning stuff like this.
Oh my: the podcast was amazing!
F/A-18 was my very FIRST flight sim and was one of the games I loved (and played) so much during my time with the Amiga 500. I recall buying my very first joystick to properly fly the Interceptor. I collected SO MANY attempts at landing on the deck (i.e.: crashes at sea) on that carrier that when I learned to do it properly, I was SO proud I bought a naval aviator badge to pin it on my backpack: I felt I was on the right trick to become a real Navy pilot!
Back in the day, playing with the Amiga was kind of a sub-culture that sprang from a clash with the “8-bitters” (owners of C-64 and ZX Spectrum): we knew we originated “from them”, but we had the BEST games; we dismissed the sorry-asses PC gamers (who were very far in the rearview mirror), because “Hey: PC isn’t good for gaming, except with Falcon 3.0”.
The magazine “The Games Machine” was then a sort of “monthly bible” that promised endless hours of delight and fun to me… well: provided that in time I had the money to own those marvels. I religiously read it over and over again and kept the pages reviewing those “most interesting games” I dreamt to have.
It was also the time of the “blue floppys”: I don’t remember exactly where they came from, but it was my first brush with software piracy. My copy of F/A-18 Interceptor was cracked by UNIT A; you can find the exact opening on YouTube at the following link: “https://youtu.be/I3sdTsVXP10?si=reXLTKlSjB6OzxY4”.
Can’t wait for the next episode! Thanks guys!
[spoiler: I broke the above-mentioned joystick flying the Tomcat on Jetfighter II]
What a lovely comment. Thank you so much!