Oh do click the image, it gets dreamier.Nearly my only relationship to video games is Frogger -- I sort of don't care whether the Frog gets across the 8-lane superhighway to safety or doesn't, I love the Squish noise -- and Crimson Skies, the version that runs on the old/original XBox.
S.W.M.B.O. loves Frogger -- she specifically loves the squished frog noise and may never have pushed a frog all the way across the superhighway, and briefly liked Crimson Skies, except that the superb flight simulation graphics make her airsick and she has to stop playing before she pukes.
I wrote an original computer game which is so perverted -- not sexually, just morally -- I was afraid to spread it around much. It has all the potential to attract the wrath of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bill O'Reilly and Nancy Grace (I regret to report that she has reproduced, twice in one day), and to end me up with a lynch mob on my lawn.
I tend to think that the entire world of videogaming is wholly devoid of authentic imagination and soul-touching æsthetic beauty. Naturally this is to be expected of games intended for a 13-year-old boy audience.
But the XBox Crimson Skies just shocked me with its visual beauty and imagination. (Note the Brooklyn Bridge as "underdrop" to the Crimson Skies screenshot above.)
The characterizations are practically stupider than DC or Marvel comic books or original movies made for the Sci-Fi Channel.
But the flights of these remarkable imaginary propeller airplanes and derigibles from the 1930s reaches deeply into my soul and makes me want to sell it to the devil for a chance to fly one of these airplanes which never existed.
Never -- but almost existed. In the Real World, the 1930s were an era of astonishingly imaginative development of high-performance high-speed propeller aircraft, many of the most remarkable of these still insisting that wood was the perfect airframe, wing and propeller material rather than aluminum. In the midst of the Great Depression, this super-expensive vanity industry should have died at birth; no financier in his right mind should have spent a dime to pursue this insane sport.
But in fact a very few visionaries in the militaries of Europe and the United States shadow-funded and encouraged the most outlandish of these overpowered engines (Rolls-Royce a leader among them) and envelope-pushing wing and airframe designs. They knew a global war was coming and knew that control of the skies would be key to deciding which side won. So they secretly encouraged and funded playboy aviators -- the industrial playboy heir Howard Hughes, the Army aviator Jimmy Doolittle -- and wildly competitive air and aerobatic races, like Formula One car races on the ground, sprang up all over the world.
All these astonishing airplanes lacked were machine guns, bombs and torpedoes. When war finally came, these were simple afterthoughts to bolt onto the astonishingly fast and maneuverable airplanes that had evolved through the sporting competitions and broken the speed, height, climb and aerobatics records. One of Hughes' designs, which he was unable to sell to the US military before the war, reappeared over the Pacific as the Japanese Zero fighter plane. The British Spitfire was the direct child of the sport competitions of the 1930s.
Crimson Skies fantasizes that this era of envelope-pushing propeller aircraft never ended, but produced astonishingly high-performance high-speed planes that simply take your breath away. With machine guns, for dogfights and to blow up super-dirigibles floating on flammable hydrogen (rather than inert helium) which filled the world's skies.
The postage stamp artist Donald Evans, whose work flourished in the 1960s and early 1970s, was also fixated with dirigibles, and his imaginary nation of Mangiare (Italian for "eating"; Evans loved Euro food) was the world leader in dirigible production. Few remember, but in the real world, huge German dirigibles ran regular luxury passenger service from Europe to South America during the 1930s. Dirigibles and blimps -- lighter-than-air craft -- match and float along with the wind currents, and passengers ride in almost perfect comfort, free of all turbulence. When the war came, dirigibles (rigid internal frames) had vanished, but blimps played important roles in anti-aircraft defense and were the perfect long-range extended patrol anti-submarine hunters and killers.
The coolest part of Crimson Skies is flying at a giant enemy dirigible and blowing it to flaming smithereens with your machine guns.
Crimson Skies just can't let go of this marvelous era of thrilling flight. It exists in PC versions, but Microsoft dumped a lot of money into pushing its graphics to the extreme in the XBox version.
I don't play Crimson Skies very much -- but I dream about it often. It's this damn gravity. Though we can't live without it and would sicken and die if it went away, we look up and see migrating geese, and hawks and eagles, and soaring seabirds, and they infect our dreams.
Last week in Lisbon, just a few meters above the Tagus, the world's remaining propeller aerobatic speed crazies held one of the world's great pylon-dodging air races. It looked thrilling.
William Faulkner was a World War One aviator in France, and afterwards wrote an exciting and brutal novel about aerobatic barnstormer competition pilots called "Pylon." Also from this era, Antoine de Saint Exupéry ("Le Petit Prince," "Vol du Nuit") was a mail pilot in the Sahara and over the Andes. (Wikipedia: He disappeared on the night of July 31, 1944 while flying on a [Free French] mission to collect data on German troop movements.)
Though male-dominated (Amelia Earhart's financial backers practically forbade her from actually flying her transatlantic plane, and she was usually under the command of an alcoholic male pilot), almost all Caucasian, and very heavy on wealthy playboys, this pioneer era of aviation also included the remarkable African-American aviatrix Bessie Coleman, child of Texas sharecroppers, who had to travel to France to get flight training and a pilot's license. She was killed in a barnstorming exhibition accident in Florida.
The disease that makes human beings want to climb into impossibly dangerous machines and fly is one of the most virulent and incurable of all psychological ailments. Usually it only takes one glimpse of somebody else flying overhead in an airplane to catch the disease. They are so close to sudden death, they are so near to the most living human beings can experience.
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from Wikipedia:
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Crimson Skies is an alternate history universe, created by Jordan Weisman and Dave McCoy, that has spawned a number of games and novels. Crimson Skies began as a pitch for a game called Corsairs! for the Virtual World location-based entertainment centers. The project was eventually shelved, but the developers saved the idea and redeveloped into a board game simulating aerial combat that was introduced by FASA in 1998.
In 2000, Zipper Interactive developed the property into a computer game, which was published by Microsoft. In 2003, it returned as Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge for the Xbox, as well as a collectible miniature games from WizKids,it is speculated of a sequel, that will be launched probabily in 2009 for Xbox 360 and PC ...
The stories and games in Crimson Skies take place in an alternate history version of the United States, where the nation crumbled into many hostile nation-states following the effects of the Great War, Prohibition, and the Great Depression. With the road and railway system destroyed, commerce took to the skies. Great cargo zeppelins escorted by fighter squadrons are the targets of many ruthless air pirates and enemy countries. Crimson Skies PC game.
When FASA Interactive joined Microsoft in 1999, Weisman had the opportunity to start a new project, and Crimson Skies was at the top of his list. This combat flight-sim offered game players fast-paced action without the hassle of realistic flight mechanics. The game included a 24-mission single-player mode and an on-line multi-player mode. Both modes made use of twelve different customizable plane designs.
The spirit of a pulp fiction novel was well captured with catchy pirate music, excellent voice acting, and great attention to detail. Unfortunately, the original release was plagued with bugs that would cause the game to freeze or crash; a patch was released to alleviate these problems.
The character of Nathan Zachary, leader of the Fortune Hunters, was introduced as the hero. He is an air pirate with a honorable slant and a concrete rule that only the wealthy will be victimized, characteristics reminiscent of Robin Hood. In fact, when a rival alludes to his aerial swashbuckling, he replies, "Let's get one thing straight, sister: Errol Flynn pretends to be me, not the other way around."
The single-player campaign chronicled the rise of the Fortune Hunters gang (with their base airship known as the Pandora) from relatively small-time thrill seekers to a renowned band of brigands, taking whichever side of the law is most convenient and profitable at that particular moment. The game was developed by Zipper Interactive and was nominated for the 2000 PC Action/Adventure Game of the Year from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, and won the Editor's Choice Award from Game Revolution, and GameSpy's Game of the Year for sound.
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Jordan Weisman is an American game designer and serial entrepreneur who has founded four major game design companies, each in a different game genre and segment of the industry. Weisman graduated from Francis W. Parker High School, in Chicago, Illinois. He went to the Merchant Marin Acadamey and briefly attended University of Illinois at Chicago, before leaving school to pursue his business interests ...
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from The Escapist:
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Number of the Beast by Shannon Drake, 28 Nov 2006 7:02 am
While Jordan Weisman guided Microsoft's game division to respectability, worked on the cutting edge with Virtual World centers, started a cool miniature gaming company and currently heads up a bleeding edge ARG design firm, he describes his background with a simple, "Let's see. I was a college dropout who founded FASA." Founded in 1980 by Weisman and a partner, FASA - short for Freedonia Aeronautics and Space Administration, after Groucho Marx's fictional country in Duck Soup - was a tabletop gaming company known for legendary franchises like Shadowrun and Battletech before becoming one of the flagship developers in Microsoft's efforts to legitimize itself in gaming. Going back a little further, Weisman describes himself as "a severe dyslexic growing up, and [I] had bluffed my way through school until about age 16. I succeeded in never actually reading a book up to that age, as many dyslexics do. You become very good at cramming your way through that kind of stuff." Dungeons & Dragons changed all that. "[When] I was a camp counselor up in Wisconsin, one of the other counselors discovered the game and brought it to camp and got me involved in it. It was a very eye-opening experience. It was this complex, immersive entertainment experience that really made you think, that made you collaborate with your peers, socialize and problem solve. It was like nothing else I'd seen." More importantly, "It also finally forced me to read, because there was no way to cheat through it. If I wanted to start telling my own stories and running my own games, I needed to read those damn books. And I also needed to read Tolkien, so I understood what the hell an elf was, and Sauron, and orcs. ... It was part of a big turning point for me." He says he "really fell in love with the concept of creating that kind of immersive social entertainment. I did that through what was left of high school and my abortive college career and then decided to go pro, if you will, [by] starting FASA."
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Hmmm this doesn't bode well for the human race. People who love video games can't spell "Merchant Marine Academy."
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