Fighter Ace

~ the obit ~

Fighter Ace covers the entire first half of my time online and I never saw a frame of it. December 1997 was a 33.6k modem in Turkey and a phone bill that charged by the minute. The game sat behind two walls at once. One was billing: a monthly charge to a card, on an American service, in a currency and a payment layer that a Turkish teenager had no way into. The other was physics. A dogfight is decided in tenths of a second, and the round trip from Ankara to a server in the United States over dial-up was not measured in tenths of a second.

Microsoft announced the idea of premium games for its Internet Gaming Zone in June 1997. The Zone crossed half a million members that October, ran a limited beta of Fighter Ace the same month, and shipped the finished thing on 18 December 1997. It was built by VR-1, a studio in Boulder, Colorado, and it was the first game Microsoft ever charged extra for on that service.

What you got was World War Two combat flight simulation with sixteen historical aircraft drawn from four air forces. You could fly free-for-all or on a team, or take the whole thing private, and a rank ladder ran from cadet up to general with some arenas gated behind it. There was a hall of fame, in-game chat, and the ability to drop into a fight already in progress. The claim in the press release was more than a hundred people flying in one arena, which in 1997 was the actual engineering achievement and everything else was decoration.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what you paid for ~

A dollar ninety-five a day, or nineteen ninety-five a month, with a free twenty-four hour trial before you picked one. Connect-time charges from your provider were your own problem on top of that. In a year when the normal way to buy a game was to buy the box once and own it, Microsoft was selling access to a room that only existed while somebody kept paying for the room.

The rest of the model came with it. Microsoft ran tournaments, the Zone press office wrote them up, squadrons formed and leagues formed around the squadrons. It is a subscription MMO in every meaningful sense, running four months after Ultima Online and getting almost none of the credit, mostly because the genre history got written around fantasy worlds rather than aircraft.

~ twelve years of landlords ~

Fighter Ace 2 and then 2.5 followed, and by then VR-1 was publishing the thing itself. Microsoft moved the Zone toward its Member Plus program in 2002 and the specialized game teams were disbanded, with Fighter Ace 2.5 pulled off MSN that May. The series carried on outside its original home: version 3 and then 3.5 went through Jaleco Entertainment and ended up at Ketsujin Studios, with the plane roster grown past ninety aircraft and the same free trial offer that had been there at the start.

That is an unusually long run for a game whose platform abandoned it. It survived the death of the service it was born on and two changes of publisher after that, and it did it on the strength of a few thousand people who wanted to fly a P-51 at other human beings on a weeknight.

~ the day it died ~

In June 2010 the developers put out a Fighter Ace Deluxe Edition, a final build meant to be played offline, which is the closest thing to a will that this kind of product ever leaves. On 1 August 2010 the online servers went off. Ongoing losses had made Ketsujin's position impossible and there was no buyer.

The best-known account of the shutdown was written by a competitor. HiTech Creations, who make Aces High, posted a page remembering Fighter Ace that spends four paragraphs on how sorry they were and the rest on why their own game was still standing. It is a strange sort of eulogy, and it is also the most complete public record of the date, which tells you how little else survived.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »