Once upon a time, flight simulations were the best-selling genre of computer games. Those days are long gone, but the sims that once dominated computer store shelves looked and played much differently from the ones we're used to today. Back then, the idea of actually modeling a combat aircraft in real-world detail was considered beyond the capabilities of the hardware in use at the time. Falcon 3.0 stood that line of thinking on its head and delivered a product that was wholly different from the crop of flight sims that were its contemporaries, both in assumptions and delivery.

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Falcon 3.0 was released in 1991, and it benefited from the heightened public interest in military hardware, thanks to the saturated media coverage of the Gulf War and the Pentagon's arsenal of high-tech smart weapons. Falcon 3.0 can in many ways be considered the first of the true "feature-rich" simulations - it was definitely the most realistic sim of its time. Billed as "the best F-16 simulator that isn't classified as top-secret," Falcon 3.0 was the first combat flight sim to aggressively pursue realistic flight physics, complex avionics, and weapons modeling. It also was among the first to implement a mission-planning feature and a flight recorder. The features that are now considered necessary in a hard-core flight sim owe their existence to Falcon 3.0. It was also the first simulation to offer a truly dynamic campaign. While many aspects of the "electronic battlefield" touted by the game went unfulfilled (shades of Falcon 4.0), the precedent had been set.

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All these features gave Falcon 3.0 a sense of authenticity that made it seem like a completely realistic F-16 simulation (for both hardware and security reasons), even if it couldn't be. The manual was exhaustive, and all aspects of the simulation screamed hard core so insistently that you couldn't help but be convinced. A whole generation of game players came away with the secret suspicion that they could fly an F-16 because they could fly Falcon 3.0. This air of authenticity is something toward which all hardcore flight sims strive, and Falcon 3.0 was the first to achieve it.

What was most revolutionary about Falcon 3.0 was its wealth of multiplayer options. It was the first flight sim to offer modem-to-modem, network, and direct-connect multiplayer options, and those who recall the lists of online Falcon pilots on CompuServe and Genie will recognize just how much the current plethora of virtual Falcon 4.0 squadrons resembles this nascent sim community writ large. Even the problematic multiplayer didn't discourage people from playing (when it worked) because Falcon 3.0 was, quite simply, so darn good. From then on, Falcon 3.0 became the benchmark for all subsequent flight sims. It was truly the best flight simulation of that time, and some might argue it was the best sim ever.

Falcon 3.0 sold well for years after its initial release, and add-on products extended its longevity. If Falcon 4.0 - now considered the pinnacle of computer flight simulations - reached for an almost unattainable perfection, it was only because Falcon 3.0 had set the bar so high. With the release of Falcon 3.0, it became apparent just how much was possible to achieve with a flight sim. Everything else was just following the pioneer.
 

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