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Anyone
who becomes an addict for computer games (like myself) usually attributes
it all to a particular game in their past. In my case, it happened a long
time ago on a DEC PDP-11 minicomputer and a game called "Mainframe
Star Trek". I was fresh out of school as an electrical engineer and
didn't know anything about software. I played this archaic text based
games over and over, until it cried out for features. I consumed some
pretty massive manuals on PDP-11 assembly language programming, getting to
the point where I was able to modify the game and add things I wanted to
see. From that point on, I was clearly hooked on playing (and writing)
computer games.
A
few years went by and the Apple II made its debut. I knew my electrical
engineer career was over. I spent all of my spare time learning about this
machine, and soon found myself as a contract programmer for the Apple II
platform. I didn't really get a chance to write games for a living, since
all of my clients were either educational, business, or utility software
companies. So once again, I did it in my spare time. I really wanted to
buy a game that was like the old Mainframe Star Trek, but it wasn't
available. To that end, I ported Mainframe Star Trek to the Apple IIGS,
and added graphic capabilities that this machine offered. That became my
first shareware title, when the whole shareware concept in its infancy. It
became quite popular at the time.
I
wrote Air Command because of a similair circumstance. I couldn't buy it. I
played all the old air traffic controller simulators (Tracon, Tower, etc)
and couldn't find anything current that matched these great games. They
crashed and just didn't work properly under later versions of Windows. I
took all the best features of these games and combined them with my own to
produce Air Command. I have never been an air traffic controller, but I
was fortunate to know someone who was, who helped me get a good balance
between game play and realism.
Air
Command 3.0 is the third iteration of my efforts. I hope you find this
latest incarnation as fun to play as it was fun for me to write it.
Joe
Jaworski
Designer: Air Command 3.0
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