Jane's WWII Fighters

• Title — Jane's WWII Fighters • Developer — Jane's Combat Simulations • Publisher — Electronic Arts • Director — Beth Comstock • Producer — Steven Matulac • Designer — Nathan Cummins David Luoto • Programmer — Ken Allen • Artist — Terry Fowler Nicholas Corea Chuck Eyler Jem Geylani • Composer — Don Veca • Series — Jane's Combat Simulations • Platforms — Microsoft Windows • Released — November 23, 1998 • Genre — Air combat simulation • Modes — Single-player, Multiplayer

The game is set in the European theater during WWII throughout 1944 into 1945. The game features famous fighter aircraft from World War II. It also included a virtual museum, where aircraft profiles and interviews with fighter pilots such as George Unwin, Günther Rall, and others could be viewed.

The game received favorable reviews according to the review aggregation website GameRankings.

The game was released in direct competition with Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator, and became a commercial flop. In 1999, Computer Gaming World reported that the game "appears to have been murdered by Microsoft's brand recognition". Its lifetime sales in the U.S. reached 60,943 copies by October 1999, which drew revenues of $2.58 million. Speaking anonymously to Bruce Geryk of GameSpot, an ex-staffer for Origin Systems remarked that the game "spent some serious cash, and did not sell". He attributed its failure to Combat Flight Simulators dominance of the World War II flight simulation field during 1998, and called the game's performance "the death knell for Jane's products", after which the brand unraveled. Following the May 2000 bankruptcy of Jane's Attack Squadron developer Looking Glass Studios shortly before that game's completion, Electronic Arts declined to finish the project, and instead opted to exit the flight simulation genre. For the week ending April 29, 2000, the game appeared at No. 10 on PC Data's weekly computer game sales chart in the United States, with an average retail price of $25. It climbed to No. 8 the following week, before exiting the charts for the May 7–13 period. PC Data named it the country's ninth-best-selling game of May 2000. By October, its sales in the region had reached 166,971 units for the year 2000 alone, which accounted for $2.5 million in revenue. Mark Asher and Tom Chick of Quarter to Three remarked that the game "did a good job of trying to convince us that flight sims aren't dead" that year.