In the days before
OpenGL - yea, the days before DirectX
? - fully three-dimensional games were limited to silly little shooters that I never really enjoyed. And then, we were blessed with X-Wing, a decent and entertaining fully-3d space shooter with lasers, Star Wars, fun cutscenes, and (of course) great music. "Could things get better?" asked a great number of geeks in the early 90s. And yes, indeed, they could. For we were then blessed with
TieFighter (shipped May 1994). Who could have guessed that fighting for the evil Empire could be so much fun? A fantastic storyline, chock-full of ships, and always challenging (if you know how to set the difficulty levels), made
TieFighter one of my favorite games of my childhood (by which I mean Before College). If you're interested in space sim games, there's a really interesting web site here:
http://www.forceforgood.co.uk/articles/bhspace.html
Thank you, Laurence Holland, for brute-forcing a great 3d engine in DOS.
(To avoid the wrath of WCom fans, I should mention that I was actually a Wing Commander player before TieFighter came out).
It should be noted that TieFighter is also the name of a super-slick color printer in the Engineering Computing Facility.
The name TieFighter originated from the space fighter in the StarWars universe, supposedly standing for Twin Ion Engine Fighter. Ion engines are in use today on long-range probes (DS1 being a good example) but only provides up to .1 newtons of thrust.
- Oh please. You KNOW it's because they look like bow ties
StarWars [Imperial Navy Ship Database]