With the advent of new technologies comes a time of innovation, a time when pioneers set out to explore the potential of the latest inventions. Red Baron is remarkable in this concern because it is not only about the early days of a new kind of warfare, but because it was in itself one of the first dedicated combat flight simulators for home computers set in this era. And so it helped to lay down the basics of the genre just like the historical biplanes in it did for the aerial combat. A very fitting combination so to speak which gives the game a timeless appeal: Entering this world of rough 3D graphics and simplistic flight models seems to have a lot in common with taking off in one of those fragile flying machines of WWI. But let us take a look at how exactly this works to the game’s (dis)advantage and what else makes it a classic.
The Patrician, covering the Hanseatic League, had just been released out of inland Germany when just few months later, things turned even more absurd when 1869, a game about worldwide maritime trade in the age of imperialism, arrived from provincial Austria. Which you wouldn't have guessed if there weren't these small in-jokes (check the description of Trieste), the game being polished through and through. Hard to believe this was the work of newcomers to the business. Though then, this was of course still the age of the bedroom coder.