It’s been hours. Fraught, imperilled, long, long hours.
From the base in south-east England we crossed the channel, and not too long after entering Nazi-controlled French airspace we were set upon by waves of German Messerschmitt Bf109s and Focke-Wulf 190s. From the cockpit I made sure all engines were just touching the redline, just enough speed to give myself and my five wingmen a fighting chance. The P-48 escort fighters could only go so far, and those that were not shredded by the Luftwaffe cannons turned for home. On our own now. This is it.
Checking the engines one last time I frantically begin switching between gun positions, the maddening thunk-thunk-thunk of enemy fire hammering my bomber. By the grace of whatever God looks after us flyboys we make it to the target and I switch to the bombardier position, line up my crosshairs, and let the 2000-pounders fall. I don’t even care if they hit the target now, some goddamn railyard. I just want to get back to England in one piece. I jump into the cockpit again, turn the autopilot off, and bank hard left. A radio message tells me we’ve destroyed buildings in our target area. Hoo-fucking-ray.
The elation is short-lived: a message also informs me my wingman has been hit. I glance behind us, and see the flaming wreck hurtling toward the ground. Parachutes. With any luck those boys will make it home. My attention has to be on my own aircraft. We’ve taken too much fire. The right outboard engine is done. I feather the props and hope the old girl has enough juice to get us home. I stare out the front. The channel is not even visible yet. I take her down to 10,000 feet. The other engines are okay, but our fuel is looking shaky. Please, God, just let us get over the channel. I can handle a forced landing as long as it’s on British soil. Hell, at this point I’ll try our luck ditching in the channel, as long as it’s swimming distance from shore.
The left outboard engine begins to release great puffed-up clouds of black smoke. I watch them trailing away into the blue sky behind us. And I also notice a lone Fw190 hovering out there, just beyond the range of our tail-gun. The engine seems to be holding, for now. Come on, old girl, don’t let me down.
A little melodramatic perhaps? Maybe. But such was the sense of realism I felt playing LucasArts’ 1991 WWII flight simulator, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. Affectionately known to us flyboys as ‘SWOTL’, the simple graphics and limited sound effects were no match for the sheer beauty of the design of this game. For starters, the view was cockpit-only. There was no ability to switch between third-person and first-person view. This made the dogfighting especially hairy, as depending on what type of aircraft you chose, the visibility could be downright non-existent.
The freedom of choice was fantastic. You could dive in for a quick dogfight, pitting your flying skills against one or several opponents of varying skill levels. You could choose to have wingmen or go it alone. You could fly a campaign as an American, wheeling a shiny silver P-51 Mustang over Nazi-occupied Europe, or you could see what it was like from the other side and become a German Luftwaffe recruit desperately trying to down a few B-17 Flying Fortress bombers in an experimental German jet fighter in the dying days of the Third Reich. You tracked your pilot’s progress by way of a status screen where you would be awarded medals based on your accumulated ‘points’ – basically how many enemy planes you shot down.
The game had some truly awesome replay-value. Not only did every mission play out differently, and I mean EVERY damn mission, there was a Mission Editor too. You could design easy ‘training’ missions to hone your skills, or brutally difficult suicide runs pitting a single fighter against unlimited waves of Veteran-level Luftwaffe jet fighters. It allowed massive amounts of creativity. There was also a really challenging Campaign mode where you took control of the American or German air war from 1943-onwards, the only goal being, win the war.
The controls were simple – joystick left and right, up and down. This game did not even have rudders, but it was totally fine, amazingly realistic physics for a flight sim made in 1991.
I’ve never quite experienced the same level of thrill since this game. There really was nothing close to it for me, at that age, playing this game. The incredible feeling of relief when my bullet-riddled, smoking hulk of a bomber was finally ‘feet dry’ over England, and on one engine I’d guide her in, the merciful little sound effect it would make as your wheels touched down. And the game seemed to realise this: it would not automatically quit you out of the mission upon landing. It would leave you there to savour the moment, the room suddenly quiet after long hours of the steady drone of the B-17 engines. And I mean hours. You had the option to speed up time (5x, 10x, 100x) for the long flight home from occupied Europe to England, but if your bomber was damaged you didn’t dare do it – if you were not present, to keep an eye on the engines, fuel gauge, etc, you could risk your plane nose-diving, and that was something you did not want happening at 100-times normal speed.
I’ve never been a huge flight-simulator fan. It has something to do with the fact that flight sims are much better on PC, and I’m a console gamer. But I think, ultimately, it has more to do with the fact that no flight sim I’ve ever played since has had the same impact on me, as SWOTL did, all those years ago. It damn near scored higher on this list, but it’s got a worthy place at number seven.
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