F-19 Stealth Fighter

The only time I can remember opening a Christmas present that wasn’t mine was in 1993. My parents and I were living off of Sunnyside Drive in Virginia Beach, VA maybe a half a mile or a little bit more down the road from from West View Auto, and my life was watching Swiss Family Robinson while I had the chicken pox and listening to my babysitter (I can’t remember her name but trust me that I’ve tried) get in a wild amount of trouble with my parents because she walked me to the gas station to get Rolos. That was also the last house I was allowed to dress up for Halloween in, which I don’t mention in order to roast my parents for it but more to point out as specifically as possible when church first started to ruin my life lol. Jesus if you’re reading this, I enjoyed parts of your book but it made the 90s a truly goofy place.

This is what was wrapped in the present that wasn’t mine:

I remember two things vividly: the art above from the front of the box, and the fact that my mom was sad that I opened it accidently because it was supposed to go with the bigger surprise of the day, which was the computer joystick she had gotten for my dad. This is why you shouldn’t have kids. You make a sad face for 3 seconds very reasonably and your son absorbs it and worries about it for the rest of his fucking life.

Anyway, this was, in every possible respect, a perfect game. I played it on DOS, but it was technically a remake of a game called Project Stealth Fighter, which was released on Commodore 64 in 1987. The port to PC was helmed by none other than Sid Meier, who would later go on to create the Civilization franchise and cement his place in the CompUSA pantheon. His work has had a massive effect on my life, and finding out tonight that he worked on this game gave me goosebumps and made me buy his memoir. I’ll let you know how the book goes, but if you don’t know who Sid Meier is, he’s basically the Dick Wolf of PC gaming.

The F-19 was later confirmed to be a fictional plane that had been hypothesized to exist based on some gaps in the Air Force’s naming protocols. But the theaters of war in the game were more real than, say, the ones in Top Gun where we’re essentially fighting a country called Blussia, and for its time it was the most immersive combat flight sim ever made. I “think” I can still remember the cockpit sounds as your plane was taking off but I’m gonna see if I can find some recordings of them and confirm.

My dad and I played this game together a ton, and I’m insanely excited to check it out again after I discovered tonight that it got ported over to Steam sometime back in 2015. I’m also excited to learn more about Sid Meier. His games had an impact on me very similar to the ones that Tolkien’s writing or George Lucas’ movies had, but I know basically nothing about him, other than that after after this game, he moved on to strategy games because “everything I thought was cool about a flight simulator had gone into that game." That struck me as a great way to know when you’re ready to move on to the next thing, and also an example of what it looks like to pour yourself into wildly different things. Cheers to a living legend, and cheers to one of the realest games ever made.