The last starfighters

I had a conversation last week with a friend who had bought Freespace 2 from Good Old Games , which got us talking about the space combat simulations and how the entire genre seems to have vanished.

This is a hobby horse of mine. I have often moaned on Screen Play that Star Wars is letting one of its greatest assets go to waste by neglecting starfighter sims. When we think of Star Wars, we generally think of two things: lightsaber battles between force-flinging Jedi and Sith, and fast-paced space warfare between nimble fighters and lumbering capital ships. It strikes me as nothing short of bizarre that this fertile subject matter has been left untouched for so long.

The modern space combat sim was arguably kicked off by the pioneering Wing Commander in 1990 - it was followed by many sequels and expansions, some good and some not so good. Throughout the 1990s, there were also classics such as the aforementioned FreeSpace series, plus I-War (also known as Independence War) and the combat-and-trade games Frontier: Elite 2 and Wing Commander: Privateer.