Note: Screenshots taken from the VGA Release

It is 1916, World War I is heating up and you're caught in the middle as a pilot in a new form of warfare – aerial warfare. This old Sierra title takes players back to the first days of aerial combat; back when fighter pilots were known as the knights of the sky.

Developer: Dynamix

Publisher: Sierra On-Line (Now known as Sierra Entertainment)

Gameplay: Red Baron was a flight simulator that took authenticity rather seriously right down to a "you die once, it is game over" philosophy. In Red Baron the airplanes handled quite poorly as one would expect from their antiquated design; it didn't take much for them to stall, and you didn't want to try performing stunts in them. There was actually a "realism menu" that let you enable or disable certain factors such as limited fuel, mid-air collisions, invulnerability, authentic instruments etc. This was a useful function for folks who were getting tired of crashing into their enemies, and at the same time hardcore gamers could play the game as it was meant to be played.

Airplane maneuverability was handled quite realistically in Red Baron

Red Baron was split into multiple mission types to give the player a bit of variety. There were standard aerial dogfight missions, patrol missions (with time compression so you didn't get bored to tears), balloon busting, Zeppelin hunting, etc. Each of the game's mission types presented a different challenge for the player while at the same time being randomly generated rather than scripted like most simulators.

You've been hit!

Design: The most interesting design feature of Red Baron I thought was the Career Mode, but before I go over that I feel that I should note that Red Baron also had a single mission mode. This mode allowed players to engage in a quick and dirty skirmish without worrying about performance. The Career Mode is where Red Baron really shined, though; the game allowed you to create a pilot profile for the "Royal Flying Air Corps" or the "German Air Service" either early, in the middle of, or late in the war.

Meet Beebo

Since the Career mode allowed you to rise through the ranks of either the Allied or German air services from 1915 to the war's conclusion in 1919; there were a number of interesting features that added a touch of realism to the experience. You could be assigned to certain squadrons or aerodromes (or even request a transfer if your rank was high enough), you could also request a specific type of aircraft and customize its paintjob if you were of the highest obtainable rank.

That big blue line is supposed to be a river

Nostalgia Factor: I really liked this particular game, so I'm sure that this reflects my rather positive opinion of it. I wouldn't call myself a huge fan, but it was good fun… especially after I figured out how to speed up time during the patrol missions.

Critical Reception: Unfortunately I could not find anything.

How it holds up: There have been many World War I simulations since Red Baron including Red Baron II and the retail re-release of Red Baron II, Red Baron 3D. In light of this Red Baron doesn't really hold up that well. Red Baron definitely deserves a place in any flight sim collector's museum, and while it is a great game potential players are better off tracking down a copy of the more advanced Red Baron 3D which did everything this game did, and more.

All in all I can't say that this game is better than most modern flight sims seeing as how flight sims are not a mainstream genre to begin with, and have not suffered over-simplification from publishers like most other genres have in recent years. This game was made freeware by Sierra a long time ago though, so I suppose it could be worth a play or two if you want to go through the effort of setting it up in DOS Box.

Useless Trivia:

- For those of you that fell asleep during world history the game was named after legendary German ace Manfred von Richthofen who was referred to as "The Red Knight" and "The Red Baron" due to the color of his plane.

- This game has absolutely no relation to the frozen pizza products of the same name. I'm serious.

External Links:

Red Baron on Moby Games

You can download a freeware version of the VGA edition of Red Baron here