Airfight is a 3D multiplayer flight simulation game and first-person shooter developed for the PLATO IV computer system in 1974.
The instruments provide necessary information on flight metrics like altitude, G-forces, roll, and pitch as well as a radar screen which displays the locations of enemy aircraft.
Development of Airfight began after the creation of two prior first-person flight games on PLATO – Spasim by Jim Bowery and Airace by Silas Warner.
Spasim was a space flight simulator which pioneered the use of 3D graphics on PLATO and featured up to 32 players competing in an arena-based first-person shooter.
Brand Fortner, a physics major at Urbana-Champaign, was impressed by Airace and wanted to develop a combat game with the same realism.
[1][2] Fortner programmed the game with fellow physics student Kevin Gorey in the TUTOR language used on the PLATO system.
Creator Bruce Artwick worked at the Aviation Research Lab at Champaign-Urbana on flight simulation programs for graphical terminals.
[3] Brand Fortner later worked for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) run out of the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana.