Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer

Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer is a computer aircraft simulation game published by Electronic Arts in 1987. It was originally released as Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Simulator. Due to a legal dispute with Microsoft over the term "Flight Simulator," the game was pulled from shelves and renamed. Many copies of the original version were sold prior to this. Chuck Yeager served as technical consultant for the game, where his likeness and voice were prominently used.

Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer
Developer(s)Lerner Research
Publisher(s)Electronic Arts
Designer(s)Ned Lerner
Platform(s)Commodore 64, Apple II, MS-DOS, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Macintosh, MSX
Release1987
Genre(s)Flight simulator
Mode(s)Single-player

The game allows a player to "test pilot" 14 different airplanes, including the Bell X-1, which Yeager had piloted to become the first man to exceed Mach 1.

The game is embellished by Yeager's laconic commentary: When the user crashes one plane, Yeager remarks "You really screwed the pooch on that one," or other asides.

Aircraft

Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer includes 11 real aircraft and three experimental aircraft designed by the developers. The fictional experimental aircraft were named after people who worked on the game.[1]

Real aircraft
Experimental aircraft
  • Grace Industries XPG-12 Samurai
  • Hilleman Ltd. XRH4 MadDog
  • Lerner Aeronautics XNL-16 Instigator

Reception

The game was a big hit for EA, selling 100,000 copies by December 1987.[2][3] Its sales had surpassed 250,000 copies by November 1989.[4] Game reviewers Hartley and Patricia Lesser complimented the game in their "The Role of Computers" column in Dragon #126 (1987), stating "There is so much in this game that it's going to be quite some time before another flight simulator can offer so much performance for your buck." The reviewers gave the PC/MS-DOS version of the game 4 out of 5 stars.[5] The Lessers reviewed the Macintosh version of the game in 1988 in Dragon #140 in "The Role of Computers" column, giving that version 4 stars as well.[6] Compute! criticized the blocky graphics and sound, but noted that the simple graphics resulted in a high frame rate. It concluded that Chuck Yeager differed from other games in simulating flying high-performance experimental aircraft.[7] In a 1994 survey of wargames Computer Gaming World gave the title one-plus stars out of five, stating that it was "More than replaced by Chuck Yeager's Air Combat".[8]

Legacy

This game was followed in 1989 by Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer 2.0 and in 1991 by Chuck Yeager's Air Combat.

gollark: Anyway. Needing to move to *yet another* place to coordinate a move, *and* not actually being able to tell people "hey we're trying to go to X other server" is a significant barrier.
gollark: What?
gollark: Wow, I made node.js break!
gollark: The forums aren't really *used* much, compared to actually being able to talk about it on this place.
gollark: 1. you disallow coordination of such a thing2. there aren't really other places

References
  1. Jermaine, John (January 1998). "Ned Lerner and Chuck Yeager: Taking Computer Flight to New Heights". Commodore Magazine. 9 (1): 69.
  2. Campbell, Colin (14 July 2015). "How EA lost its soul, chapter 8". Polygon. Vox Media. Retrieved 15 July 2015.
  3. "Yeager Leads Video Games Resurgence". Press-Courier. December 13, 1987. Retrieved March 5, 2012.
  4. Staff (November 1989). "Chart-Busters; SPA Platinum". Game Players (5): 112.
  5. Lesser, Hartley; Lesser, Patricia (October 1987). "The Role of Computers". Dragon (126): 82–88.
  6. Lesser, Hartley; Lesser, Patricia; Lesser, Kirk (December 1988). "The Role of Computers". Dragon (140): 74–79.
  7. Bobo, Ervin (December 1987). "Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer". Compute!. p. 44. Retrieved 10 November 2013.
  8. Brooks, M. Evan (January 1994). "War In Our Time / A Survey Of Wargames From 1950-2000". Computer Gaming World. pp. 194–212.
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