Keeping Space Combat Sims Alive

If there's one game genre that seems to be universally loved and desperately missed by PC gamers, it's the space combat simulation. The issue continues to come up in forum discussions, comment threads, and blog posts: where have all the space sims gone? What once dominated the PC gaming landscape has become a black hole into which developer time and money were thrown, never to be seen again. The development of space combat sims has not halted entirely, but it's definitely not the juggernaut it was in the 90s. With very few new games on the horizon, how are fans of the space sim to bide their time waiting for the cyclical nature of PC gaming to swing back around and start the next revolution?

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One of the things that keeps the starfighter pilot in me alive is replaying the old games that got us into the genre. Retro gaming isn't for everyone, so thankfully there are some very talented people out there who are not satisfied with just loading up the old games and playing through them in their original state. Until the developers and publishers can find a good enough excuse to return to the genre and deliver a true free-form space combat sim, there are some excellent alternatives available from the mod communities of several of the favourites from way back when. These people have taken it upon themselves to apply their diverse talents to updating the classics as much as possible, keeping them in a playable state with visuals that can still sell the illusion.

What started the space combat sim movement? The earliest games in the genre were natural extensions of the creators' desires to emulate the action from "Star Wars", "Battlestar Galactica", and to some extent, "Star Trek". Games like Elite led the charge in the '80s, but it was Chris Roberts' Wing Commander, released in 1990, that successfully mixed a space flight model with a compelling narrative, placing players in the role of an officer of the Confederation stationed on the TCS Tiger's Claw. The story was nothing revolutionary in and of itself, but the mix of combat and newsreel-style cinematics kept the story interesting, and the player always informed about the stakes of the bigger picture. Wing Commander was the beginning of one of the most successful space sim franchises to date. It led to four sequels, a couple of spin-off series, novelizations, and even an ill-fated attempt at a motion picture (directed by none other than Chris Roberts himself).

The other game largely responsible for the success of the genre was Lucasarts' X-Wing, released in 1993. X-Wing also became an extremely successful game franchise, spawning three sequels and several collections; it helped to keep space games alive through the 1999 release of X-Wing Alliance, which was the last in the series.

As is the case for any game genre, the success of Wing Commander and X-Wing paved the way for other companies to release space combat games and soon store shelves were swarmed with pretenders. Some of these games were very good in their own right, but none could recreate the success of Wing Commander and X-Wing, and soon market saturation eroded consumer interest, resulting in poor sales.

You can place the blame for this squarely at your own feet - or at least the feet of your friends who stopped buying space games. We vote with our dollars, and when highly-anticipated games like FreeSpace 2 in 1999, Independence War 2 in 2001, and Freelancer in 2003 all recorded disappointing sales figures, the message we were sending seemed clear. From the distributor's and developer's perspectives, we had all moved on to first-person shooters and real-time strategy games. The late '90s saw the FPS and RTS markets start to pick up considerably, in addition to the resurrection of the hardcore PC role-playing game, and many PC gamers opted to forgo the learning curve of simulation games in favour of the accessibility and speed of shooters.

Another factor is that with multiplayer quickly becoming an enormous component of the PC gaming experience, players were no longer gaming in a vacuum, so to speak - the number of your friends that had a game became a drawing factor. Shared experience replaced single-player storytelling, and developers were forced to follow suit. It wasn't long before the space combat sim all but disappeared, banished to the fringes of gaming. There it has continued in an endangered-species existence, protected by niche followers and mod communities.

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