Space flight simulation game

• 1. Introduction

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  Space flight simulation games ask a deceptively simple question: what would it actually feel like to fly through space? The answer, it turns out, depends entirely on who is asking. Some games hand you a physics engine and a checklist. Others hand you a laser cannon and a feline enemy race called the Kilrathi. Both claim the same genre label. Both have devoted audiences. And for a stretch of the new millennium, both were considered dead.

  Elite, the game many credit as the genre's breakthrough, fits inside 22 kilobytes of memory. That is smaller than most email attachments today. Yet it lodged itself so deeply in the minds of developers that the co-founder of CCP Games, creator of EVE Online, cites it as the game that affected him most on the Commodore 64. Wing Commander, by contrast, cost five times more to produce than nearly any other game of its era. It forced the whole industry to raise its budgets. Two wildly different ambitions, one shared orbit.

  How did a genre born from wireframe graphics on home computers split into such divergent forms? What killed it in the late 1990s? And what brought it back?

• 2. The Realism Divide

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  Orbiter, Kerbal Space Program, and Microsoft Space Simulator sit at one end of a long spectrum. These games aim to move a spacecraft in ways that conform with actual physical laws, including orbital calculations that most so-called simulators skip entirely. At the other end sit Wing Commander, Star Wars: X-Wing, and Freelancer. These games treat physics as a suggestion, invoking fictional technological advances to explain why spacecraft dogfight like World War II fighters.

  The distinction matters because the two approaches produce entirely different experiences. In a realistic simulator, the player's reward is mastering celestial mechanics and astronautics. Piloting is often limited to dockings, landings, or orbital maneuvers. Players follow checklists. The drama is technical. Classic titles built around this philosophy include Space Shuttle: A Journey into Space from 1982, Rendezvous: A Space Shuttle Simulation also from 1982, The Halley Project from 1985, and Shuttle from 1992.

  Kerbal Space Program occupies an interesting middle ground. It portrays an imaginary universe with adjusted physics, masses, and distances to keep gameplay accessible. Even so, the rocket design principles inside it are far more rigorous than anything found in the combat or trading subgenres. Players who want still more accuracy can install mods such as Real Solar System and Realism Overhaul, which replace the game's fictional solar system with a 1:1 replica of the real one.

  FlightGear sits at the most serious end of the simulation scale. Its flight dynamics engine, JSBSim, was used in a 2015 NASA benchmark to judge new simulation code against the standards of the space industry. The program can handle speeds from subsonic all the way through high hypersonic and re-entry regimes. Its Space Shuttle project is backed by NASA windtunnel data and is described as the most detailed and accurate Space Shuttle simulation outside of NASA's own internal tools.

• 3. How the Genre Began

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  Early attempts at three-dimensional space simulation date to 1974's Spasim, an online multiplayer game in which players tried to destroy one another's ships. That same year produced Star Trader, whose entire interface was text-only and whose star map tracked multiple ports buying and selling six commodities. It was written in BASIC.

  Star Raiders arrived in 1980 for the Atari 8-bit computers, becoming the system's killer application. Doug Neubauer designed it as a cross between Star Wars and the text-based Star Trek mainframe game. Using smoothly scaled two-dimensional sprites and three-dimensional particles to fake a first-person view of space, Star Raiders let players clear sectors of enemy ships while managing resources and damage to their own vessel. The game's galactic map and sector scanner updated in real-time, never pausing even when the player switched views. Star Raiders inspired Elite and the Wing Commander series directly, and it produced immediate clones: Space Spartans for Intellivision and Starmaster for the Atari 2600, both appearing in 1982.

  By 1982, the genre was already branching. Star Trek: Strategic Operations Simulator appeared that year featuring five different controls, six enemy types, and 40 simulation levels, making it one of the most elaborate vector games ever released. Nasir Gebelli released two Apple II games the same year: Horizon V, which introduced an early radar mechanic, and Zenith, which let the player's ship rotate. A title called Ginga Hyoryu Vifam allowed first-person open space exploration with a physics engine that simulated gravitational pull when the player's ship approached a planet.

  Star Luster, released for the NES and arcades in 1985, pushed the idea further still. It gave players a cockpit view, a radar showing enemy and base positions, a warp capability, and a date system that tracked the passage of in-game time. The groundwork for everything that followed was being laid across half a dozen platforms simultaneously.

• 4. Elite and Its Shadow

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  Elite did something that no space game before it had fully achieved: it blended space trading and flight simulation into a single seamless world. The game that resulted is widely considered the genre's breakthrough title, and its influence has never entirely faded.

  In interviews, senior producers at CCP Games named Elite as one of the inspirations for EVE Online. Developers of Jumpgate Evolution, Battlecruiser 3000AD, Infinity: The Quest for Earth, Hard Truck: Apocalyptic Wars, and Flatspace have all credited it as a source. At Telespiele, a German technology and games trade show, Elite was named one of the sixteen most influential games in history. The Times Online ranked it the third most influential video game ever in 2007. Beebug Magazine called it the best game ever made for the BBC Micro back in 1984. Its sequel, Frontier: Elite II, placed 77th on PC Zone's 101 Best PC Games Ever list, also in 2007.

  What makes the original Elite's achievement more striking is its physical scale. The entire game fits inside 22 kilobytes, residing on a single floppy disk. It has been called the first truly open-ended game and has been credited with opening the door to later online persistent worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft.

  Elite is also one of the most popularly requested games to be remade. The latest version of the franchise, Elite: Dangerous, was released on the 16th of December 2014, following a successful Kickstarter campaign. Its arrival brought new attention to the space trading and combat subgenre. Trade Wars, a lesser-known but historically important multiplayer space trader from 1984, draws its own lineage through a completely different branch of the tree, having been inspired by Hunt the Wumpus, the board game Risk, and Star Trader. PC World Magazine named it the tenth best PC game in 2009.

• 5. Wing Commander's Impact

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  Wing Commander arrived in 1990 from Origin Systems, Inc., and it changed the economics of the entire games industry. Designer Chris Roberts described it as World War II in space. The game is set beginning in the year 2654 and pits a multinational cast of pilots from the Terran Confederation against the Kilrathi, a feline warrior race modeled partly on the Kzinti from Larry Niven's Known Space novels.

  Game designer Chris Crawford described Wing Commander as having raised the bar for the whole industry in an interview. The game cost five times more to produce than most of its contemporaries. Because it succeeded commercially, other publishers had to match its production values to compete. Crawford argued that this drove a large portion of the video game industry toward conservatism, because expensive games needed guaranteed returns. Wing Commander reestablished the action game as the most profitable category of computer game, a consequence that shaped what developers were willing to attempt for years afterward.

  The franchise expanded well beyond video games. Wing Commander eventually encompassed an animated television series, a feature film, a collectible card game, a series of novels, and action figures. Its first entry also triggered the development of competing space combat titles, most notably LucasArts' X-Wing.

  Star Citizen, currently in development by Cloud Imperium Games under Chris Roberts, the same designer behind Wing Commander and Freelancer, aims to combine the living-universe scale of EVE Online with the fast action of more traditional space combat games. By May 2016, the project had raised more than $114 million through crowdfunding, a figure that set a record when Star Citizen's campaign launched in November 2012.

• 6. Death and Revival

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  The late 1990s were unkind to space flight games. The rise of real-time strategy, first-person shooter, and role-playing genres pulled audiences away. Warcraft, Doom, and Diablo represented the new commercial centers of gravity. The very qualities that had made space sims compelling for their fans, the open-endedness, the complex controls, the layers of detail, were now being cited as the reasons the genre could not grow.

  The consensus that formed was stark: no major new space sim series would be produced as long as the genre depended on keyboards and joysticks. There were exceptions, including the X series, which ran from 1999 through 2018, and EVE Online. But for most of the new millennium the genre was described simply as dead.

  The early 2010s brought an unexpected shift. Crowdfunding provided a route around traditional publishers who had written the genre off. Elite: Dangerous was crowdfunded on Kickstarter across November and December 2012. Born Ready Games closed a Kickstarter campaign at the end of 2012 having raised nearly $180,000 for Strike Suit Zero, which was completed and released in January 2013. Everspace, a non-linear roguelike space shooter, gathered almost $250,000 on Kickstarter and released in May 2017.

  The open-source community contributed as well. Projects like FS2 Open and Vega Strike became platforms for non-professional development efforts. Unofficial remakes of Elite and Privateer were built using the Vega Strike engine, with the Privateer remake reaching a stage where it could be offered as a working title. A hobbyist space flight simulator project called Pioneer was realized in 2013. After 2014, however, the genre entered another extended quiet period without notable releases. Kerbal Space Program, released commercially in 2011, remained notably well-received, including by the aerospace community, as one of the period's most recognized titles.

• 7. Trading, Combat, and Open Worlds

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  The space trading and combat subgenre follows a formula that has held for decades. A player starts with a small, outdated ship and limited resources. Progress comes through trading, combat, exploration, or some combination of the three. Notable titles built around this structure include Elite, the X series, Wing Commander: Privateer, Freelancer, and No Man's Sky.

  In many titles the plot matters less than the sandbox. Certain X series games allow players to ignore the story indefinitely or disable it entirely in favor of open-ended play. Critics have noted that the freedom offered in some titles is partly illusory: the available roles can end up more similar than they appear, and scripted sequences can constrain open-ended play in ways that frustrate the genre's promise. One reviewer compared Freelancer unfavorably with Grand Theft Auto on this point, arguing that Freelancer's narrative structure was rigid where GTA's was genuinely open.

  EVE Online, released in 2003, pushed the living-universe concept further than any prior title by accommodating thousands of simultaneous online players. The source of EVE's DNA traces partly back to Elite. Þórólfur Beck, CCP's co-founder, has credited Elite as the game that shaped him most on the Commodore 64, a direct line from a 22-kilobyte game on a single floppy disk to a persistent online world with a player-driven economy.

  Beyond the core genres, some tabletop and board games share the same mechanical DNA, including Traveller and Merchant of Venus. Traveller's influence on Elite runs deep enough to show up in the characters' names: the protagonist of Traveller is named Jamison, and the protagonist of Elite is named Jameson.