![F/A-18 Interceptor, San Francisco Bay Area, by Alex Millard.
F-18 Interceptor was the first game I remembering “getting good” at. It was not easy, straight forward, or explicable. I was also 5 years old when it came out. Top Gun had also come out. So to 5-10 year old me this: was the coolest game that had been or would ever be made. It had 3D Graphics, It had Sweet Music, It had Physics, variable systems load outs based on real world weapons! The whole modern FPS was sitting there right in front of me. But the part of the game that caught me deep in my heart was when you loaded a mission: You stared at an aerial view of the SF Bay and then the game would slowly ZOOM IN until you were in the cockpit of your plane!My tiny mind has not recovered from how hard it was blown by that. To this day it is not a bad looking bit of graphics.
[Josh says: this awesome bit of watercolor mapstalgia courtesy my brother. We spent just stupid ages taking turns on this game, on our Amiga 500. Some of the time we’d actually dogfight AI planes, but most of the time we were just dorking around the Bay Area flying like jerks.
This was 1988, so the Amiga’s graphics were fairly revelatory for a home gaming machine but the 3D geometry was pretty spartan to keep the polygon count down; the Transamerica pyramid, right at the center of this map, was one of the few interesting tall things in SF and so got a lot of missiles chucked into it. There was a little smoke plume and everything.
But the main stunt was, as Alex notes, flying under the Golden Gate Bridge upside down, ideally at mach 1+ speeds with the afterburners blowing. We had a terrible non-analog joystick and the game ran at probably about 6 fps most of the time, so this was a pretty significant logistical challenge. And then we’d try to jump to the exterior side view to watch the fly-under and that’d just make it that much more likely that we’d crash.
Also! We only got a sidecar harddrive-and-memory memory upgrade years after we’d had the Amiga and played stuff to death already, so it was a hell of a surprise to install that, boot up Interceptor, and suddenly, for the first time ever, hear this awesome freakin’ theme that we finally had enough RAM to enable playback of.]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly41ffojvZ1rn1cvho1_1280.jpg)
F/A-18 Interceptor, San Francisco Bay Area, by Alex Millard.
F-18 Interceptor was the first game I remembering “getting good” at. It was not easy, straight forward, or explicable. I was also 5 years old when it came out. Top Gun had also come out. So to 5-10 year old me this: was the coolest game that had been or would ever be made.
It had 3D Graphics, It had Sweet Music, It had Physics, variable systems load outs based on real world weapons! The whole modern FPS was sitting there right in front of me. But the part of the game that caught me deep in my heart was when you loaded a mission: You stared at an aerial view of the SF Bay and then the game would slowly ZOOM IN until you were in the cockpit of your plane!
My tiny mind has not recovered from how hard it was blown by that.
To this day it is not a bad looking bit of graphics.
[Josh says: this awesome bit of watercolor mapstalgia courtesy my brother. We spent just stupid ages taking turns on this game, on our Amiga 500. Some of the time we’d actually dogfight AI planes, but most of the time we were just dorking around the Bay Area flying like jerks.
This was 1988, so the Amiga’s graphics were fairly revelatory for a home gaming machine but the 3D geometry was pretty spartan to keep the polygon count down; the Transamerica pyramid, right at the center of this map, was one of the few interesting tall things in SF and so got a lot of missiles chucked into it. There was a little smoke plume and everything.
But the main stunt was, as Alex notes, flying under the Golden Gate Bridge upside down, ideally at mach 1+ speeds with the afterburners blowing. We had a terrible non-analog joystick and the game ran at probably about 6 fps most of the time, so this was a pretty significant logistical challenge. And then we’d try to jump to the exterior side view to watch the fly-under and that’d just make it that much more likely that we’d crash.
Also! We only got a sidecar harddrive-and-memory memory upgrade years after we’d had the Amiga and played stuff to death already, so it was a hell of a surprise to install that, boot up Interceptor, and suddenly, for the first time ever, hear this awesome freakin’ theme that we finally had enough RAM to enable playback of.]
