Civilian flight simulations

Released in 1987, this is less of a simulator and more of a fever dream where you pilot a flying box over a grid pretending to be terrain. 3-D Helicopter Simulator was ambitious for its time, with wireframe graphics that suggest a helicopter-shaped object doing helicopter-shaped things. You’ll take off, hover awkwardly, and then promptly cras...

Released in 1993 for DOS, A320 Airbus is less “Top Gun” and more “Intro to Aeronautical Bureaucracy.” It’s a flight simulator so realistic, even real pilots needed a manual. You’ll experience the thrill of pre-flight checklists, taxiing, and trying to not crash because you missed a single digit in your descent ra...

Welcome to the most stressful job in the world - rendered in glorious 1985 DOS graphics! Air Traffic Controller lets you experience the thrill of herding aircraft without the luxury of coffee breaks or radar resolution. It’s tense, it's crude, and it's a miracle anyone survived your first session. You’ll learn that "near miss" is just a...

Ah yes, Air Trax from 1983 - a game where “flight” is more of a philosophical concept. It’s clunky, it's slow, and it looks like it was coded in someone’s garage (because it probably was). But there’s charm in this pixelated mess. You guide your plane through narrow gaps while wondering why gravity has such a personal ...

Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0 (MSFS 4.0) is a flight simulation game released by Microsoft in 1989 for MS-DOS. It was the fourth major version of the Microsoft Flight Simulator series and introduced several improvements over its predecessor, Flight Simulator 3.0. Flight physics were more realistic, incorporating wind effects, turbulence, and ...

Not many people know that the first games created by Sid Meier were flight simulations. Solo Flight was published by MicroProse in 1983 for Commodore 64, Apple II, Atari, and a year later, in 1984, for PC. The game takes place in the United States. As a fliying mailmain, the goal of the game is to deliver mail across the U.S.A.