| The History of Air Warrior |
Air Warrior started as a program written by Kelton Flynn back when he was working on his Ph.D. (in nuclear engineering or physics, as I recall). It didn't bear much resemblance to the Air Warrior of today -- you'd type in maneuvers for your plane; your opponent would type in maneuvers for his plane; the computer would crunch some numbers and come up with new plane positions;and so on. It was played over terminals on the school's mainframe. Kelton got a lot more interested in this and decided after graduation (along with one of his pals -- John Taylor) to found a company to produce a multi-player flight sim. So in 1981 Kesmai was formed, and Air Warrior was conceived. Kesmai started out with all of a couple of employees.
To implement Air Warrior, Kesmai hooked up with GEnie, a new on-line service at the time. Air Warrior came out in 1987 and was the first multi-player combat flight simulator (at least outside of the military). Back then it cost $10 or $12 per hour to play and was available only for Macintoshes. That was in the days when Macs had the little nine-inch black-and-white screens and no joysticks. Still, I remember what a blast it was to find such a thing in those days: an honest-to-God multi-player combat flight sim!
That first version of Air Warrior was pretty rough by today's standards. The frame rate was low (perhaps a handful of frames per second, depending on which type of computer you had), rough black-and-white graphics, bullets that flew on laser-beam straight paths, and wacky bugs (like being able to climb to the stratosphere as long as your plane was climbing while inverted). But there was nothing else like it out there. Keep in mind that Air Warrior was out only a handful of years after the original Flight Simulator by Bruce Artwick of SubLogic, when the best PC-based flight sims in the world didn't have much more than Air Warrior in the way of graphics and had no multi-player component at all. For people like me -- raving WWII aviation enthusiasts -- this was a dream come true.
As the years chugged on, the Air-Warrior program was refined (adding more realistic gunnery and getting rid of flight-dynamics bugs), and the program was ported to the Atari and Amiga computers. Of course, folks at Kesmai knew that they were missing a big market in the PC and announced their plans for a DOS-based EGA version for the PC. Jeez, did that ever start the comments flowing on GEnie's Air-Warrior message boards. Lots of people were concerned that the PC folks would swarm into the arenas, flooding the arenas to overflowing with dweebs who didn't know how to fly. There would go the neighborhood. Maybe it was a little like that at first (not as much challenge for the old folks), but then the PC folks learned the ropes just like everyone else had, and the game had more participants, which added to the fun.
Scenarios were also introduced into the mix of fun. Pioneered by guys like Doktor Gonzo (or "Dok"), these were battles set up with definite objectives and resources. To me, playing in a historical scenario gave the same feeling I got when reading about real WWII air combat. To me, scenarios seemed like a whole new level of fun in Air Warrior.
But then came the "stagnant" years. Kesmai continued to make minor refinements, but some people had been asking for more realism or more features for a long time, and Kesmai wasn't giving much feedback. Previously, Kesmai had given lots of feedback and had talked to the players a lot about proposed improvements and new versions. Without the feedback, a lot of us figured that Air Warrior was stagnating, that Kesmai was more interested in producing other games that perhaps brought in more money. A lot of the old timers thought that this was the beginning of the end for Air Warrior, the start of a slow decline into obscurity.
What we didn't know was that Kesmai was working on a vastly improved version, the SVGA version for DOS. Besides much higher resolution and better graphics, it would have most of the realism features that had asked for over the years: stalls, spins, blackouts, etc. There would be accompanying changes in the on-line arenas. Kesmai hadn't talked about it at all, though, because they were tired of the players constantly asking, "When will it be out? You said it would be out in two weeks. It's past two weeks, so when will it be out, huh? When?" That gets old very fast during a development process.
So, to the surprise of many, Kesmai came out with the new SVGA version, which fairly closely resembled the versions available today. The Mac version was updated, too. About that time, the Atari ST and Amiga were declining into obscurity, and Kesmai dropped their support for those platforms. SVGA Air Warrior, with its up-to-date features, generated some interest from the retail market, and Kesmai entered into a deal to market itin stores. Unfortunately, that petered out due (it seemed to me) to poor distribution on the part of the distribution company (not Kesmai) and to a game that was not tailored to the ham-fisted "I want eye candy" arcade-game crowd (which seems larger than the rabid "I want realism" WWII air-combat-enthusiast crowd). However, this blip on the retail market might have contributed to Air Warrior being noticed by a Japanese company. The company invested a bit in Air Warrior, paying for the addition of artwork and data sets for some of the Japanese planes. At any rate, things were back to humming along in Air Warrior.
The Air-Warrior Training Academy started sometime around 1993 or 1994. A bunch of the veteran players, knowing how steep the learning curve was for Air Warrior, wanted to help new playersget up to speed more quickly. Also, Kesmai entered into deals with two other on-line services -- Delphi and CRIS -- to offer Air Warrior. Players liked this because it introduced some price competition into the mix. GEnie had already dropped its on-line charges from $10-$12/hour to $6/hour. Now, with the extra competition, it went to something like $3/hour. I think that Kesmai was finally starting to make some money, too, because it hired a lot more people, many of them from the ranks of avid Air-Warrior players.
So, the Training Academy was up and running. Air Warrior was running on GEnie, Delphi, and CRIS. Scenarios were humming along. The cost for Air Warrior declined to $2/hour and less. Things were great. And then, in 1996, they got even better, although in an erratic way. Kesmai made a deal with CompuServe, America Online, and Earthlink to offer Air Warrior on their services; and GEnie, long the most popular spot for Air Warrior, pretty much went belly up (due, in my opinion, to very poor management and to being far behind the technology curve).
Overall, Kesmai now had a much larger market because of the size of America Online and CompuServe, but for a couple of reasons, there was a lot of disruption in late 1996 and early 1997. First, the demise of GEnie as THE place for Air Warrior caused a scattering of the Air-Warrior community and a momentary halt in scenarios and the Training Academy. It was sad to see all of the old timers scattering to the winds, and some seemed to drift off altogether during this time of change. (Sniff, sniff.) There was even another Air-Warrior-like product out there: ICI's WarBirds, written in part by Air-Warrior veterans HiTech, Caligula, and Pyro. This drew off some Air-Warrior players, too, but competition is a very good thing for us consumers. Second, Kesmai rapidly developed successive new versions of Air Warrior that, because of improvements, were incompatible with other versions; and Kesmai dropped some of the older versions. During 1996, they released Air Warrior for Windows, Air Warrior for Windows 95, and a corresponding beta version for the Macintosh. In January, 1997, they dropped support for SVGA Air Warrior and the SVGA-style Mac version. In late February, 1997, they released Air Warrior II for Windows 95.
[On December 10th 1997, Air Warrior 3D started beta testing on Bigweek and became available through GameStorm in Febuary 1998. It wasn't long before GS decided to close the doors on the MAC community and shutdown the MAC AW servers. -- Afkamm]
The incompatibilities lead to a fragmentation of the Air-Warrior universe. The current situation is that there are four separate sets of arenas: one set for Air Warrior II on Delphi, Earthlink, and CompuServe; one for Air Warrior for Windows on Delphi, Earthlink, and CompuServe; one for Air Warrior for Windows on America Online; and one for the beta version of Air Warrior for the Mac. Thus, users on Delphi, Earthlink, and CompuServe who use Air Warrior II can play together in a scenario; but people using Air Warrior for Windows, Air Warrior for the Mac, or playing on America Online can't participate in the same scenario since their arenas are separate.
Still, despite such fragmentation, the future of Air Warrior looks brighter than ever mainly because popularity is higher than ever. I think that Kesmai is finally starting to make a decent amount of money from Air Warrior -- and more money encourages more development. Air Warrior II is out and selling in stores; the Air-Warrior Training Academy is getting back up to speed; war nights are up and running; and I hear rumors of more frequent scenarios. I hope that a new Air-Warrior community will form around the "alt.games.air-warrior" newsgroup, where people can participate no matter which arenas they fly in.
So, after writing all of this, after having thought back to those days a decade ago when first I took to Air Warrior's virtual skies, I am left with many thoughts. Three stand out: first, that Air Warrior has progressed so far over the years; second, that compared to the old days, Air Warrior is so cheap to play; and third, that if it had been this way back in 1987, I never would have graduated.
-- Brooke
[Just into the New Year of 2001, Air WarriorMV (Millennium Version) came into being. This was basically the same as the 3D version, but with a new graphical interface that only supported 800x600 and higher, plus a few bugs fixes and some added extras (a buff pilot being able to gun whilst in a multiplayer game :).
A month later GameStorm closed its doors and AW took up a permanent home at EA's game website. The first month was beta so it was free, but after that a Premium subscription fee started, $9.99 a month, 5 cents more than GameStorm (we were told it would be cheaper lol). When you think about it, that's a lot for a game version that never left beta and never had as near a huge community as Ultima Online[1]. Both of which were badly affected by EA's buy out of GameStorm as the development that was going on for each games next version were scrapped. No AW4 :'(
Sadly on December 8th 2001, EA closed its doors on Air Warrior and you can no longer fly online with it in a multiplayer theatre. The end of a era? the end of a community? Not so, AW will re-appear one day, once Kelton can buy it back from EA ;) and the community lives on in the Bigweek newsgroup, most of whom are now flying other flightsims like AcesHigh. -- Afkamm]
[1]GameStorm didn't own or host UO. It was just one of the many games that were affected by EA who didn't have a clue what they were doing.
started beta testing on
This page came from the "How to fly and fight in Air Warrior" v3/21/97 by Brooke P. Anderson.
Here are two funny stories about the beginning of Air Warrior.