This Saitek X52 Pro 'HOTAS' was designed for resolutely Earthly flight sims, but it absolutely looks like the controls for a spaceship. My desk is overwhelmed by an enormous flight stick, made of two shoebox-sized components bearing over 30 buttons and clad in surprisingly sleek, industrial black and chrome colours. Where's the seat of the pants stuff? Where's the fantasy of it all? Where's the game that makes me want to stick a cardboard overlay on my keyboard, or buy a new joystick? Where's the space game that matches the thrill and escapism of the first-person shooters of the time? Years later still, I dallied with Freelancer, but much as I liked it, somehow it wasn't quite there.Īpril 2014. Plenty of space games, yes, but what a mess: a split between poorly-received licensed drek and deep-dive sims with narrow appeal. Look to the turn of the century and the writing's on the wall. Part of that was me, as the earliest stages of an alcohol-orientated social life flickered into being, and part of that was the genre becoming less exciting and more elaborate - though it meant I missed out on some of greats, such as Freespace, I-War and the last worthwhile Lucasarts efforts. Then, around 1997, it stopped, or at least seemed to. Elite: Frontier, TIE Fighter and X-Wing, Privateer. I peer back into the mist of early teenage years stranded in the countryside with a 486 as almost my only companion, and space games were so important to me. After having barely touched space games for years, I now find myself owning a £120 joystick and obsessed with Elite 4.
The comeback, thanks to the removal of almost all middlemen and the ability to engage directly with an audience large enough but spread far and wide, is something I find incredibly exciting. What remained turned inwards, servicing the very particular demands of a passionate few, and making themselves all the more inaccessible to those who were interested but not quite so fervent about it. Though there have always been survivors, they all but died out because they required huge budgets to pull off well, but could not command the sort of easily advertised-at mainstream audience required to earn their keep. For example: space sims didn't all but die out because the possibilities were exhausted. Sometimes it seems like a roadblock to fresh invention, other times it seems like returning to roads that games were forcibly and unfairly turned away from as forces of marketing and demographic-chasing decided they weren't suitably commercially viable. I come and go on old franchises and old ideas being resurrected by rich old men for rather less rich and old men and women.
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