Knights of the Sky

• Title — Knights of the Sky • Developer — MicroProse • Publisher — MicroProse • Designer — Jeff Briggs • Released — 1990: MS-DOS 1991: Amiga, Atari ST • Genre — Combat flight simulator • Modes — Single-player, multiplayer (head-to-head) • Platforms — MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari ST

Knights of the Sky has multiple gameplay options including full World War 1 campaign, single dogfight, head to head and flight training. The World War 1 campaign mode involves the players through a series of missions. Each mission contains an objective (ex: bomb a specific German airport behind enemy lines) as well as a number of dogfights that would naturally arise in the course of attempting to complete the primary objective. The game would track the number of enemy planes the players shot down in total and would rank the character as compared to other famous World War I aces. Iconic World War 1 flying aces like the Red Baron as well as other well-known historic figures are included in the game and would occasionally be encountered in dogfights. When progressing through the game the mechanic would provide intel on where the players might encounter these aces. The single Dogfight mode allows the player to select from a number of historical World War 1 aces with which to engage in a dogfight. Head to head mode allows the player to challenge another player to a dogfight.

The game's working title was Red Baron, until this name was used by Dynamix for Red Baron when the latter had been publicly announced first. Following its original PC release, the game underwent two subsequent patch-style revisions that would add a more realistic plane damage system (source of much of the early controversy, as just one well placed bullet could cause critical damage and taking non-critical hits were not communicated to the player whatsoever), and active NPC allied planes undergoing their patrols (in a way similar to enemy patrols), available for free after sending a blank floppy disk to MicroProse.