Falcon (computer game)

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The Falcon line of computer games is a series of simulations of the F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter aircraft. The games were developed and published by Spectrum HoloByte (later MicroProse). They were noted for their high level of realism unseen in contemporary simulation games.

Screenshot from Atari ST

There were five major versions of Falcon:

Falcon (1987)
Falcon AT (1988)
Falcon 3.0 (1991)
Falcon 4.0 (1998)
Falcon 4.0: Allied Force (2005)

The 3.0 version claimed to have used flight dynamics from a real military simulator, and required a math coprocessor for the computation of the high fidelity flight model. It retained its status as the most realistic flight simulation game for years.

The games were also noted for their early multiplayer support, as even the first version supported two players via a null modem connection.

Falcon 4 has been the source of much controversy due to source code being leaked from Microprose when development ceased. In the years between the source code leak and the release of Allied Force, many "unofficial" tweaks were released by the Falcon 4 online community to fix bugs and enhance the game for modern systems.

Many of these enhancements have found their way into Allied Force and Free Falcon, which is a freeware version that requires an original 1998 falcon 4.0 install and a update called 108 US patch. (the last official patch for Falcon 4.0 developed by Microprose)