Hellcats was a major release for the Mac platform, one of the first 3D games to be able to drive a 640 x 480 x 8-bit display at reasonable frame rates in an era when the PC clone's VGA at 320 x 240 x 4-bit was the standard.

The graphics engine was combined with a simple Mac interface, a set of randomized missions, and a number of technical features that greatly enhanced the game's playability and made it a lasting favorite into the mid-1990s.

They also licensed the basic flight engine to another group of programmers, who used it as the basis for early versions of the online game, WarBirds.

After starting the game the player finds themselves in a minimal interface consisting of a small number of dialog boxes for preferences and selecting missions.

The entire interface was based on the Mac's built-in UI, as opposed to hand-rolled elements built out of the game engine itself.

View controls allowed for a number of different options, including tower views and similar, but also a "slow following" chase mode that slowed down transitions between different flight directions in order to reduce the total amount of movement when correcting for small adjustments in flight path (this is now common to most games).

Air-to-air combat was relatively simple, normally degenerating into a turning fight which, unrealistically, the F6F could win by lowering its flaps.

[2] Another issue with the combat system was sighting distances, which made targets practically invisible at even a few kilometers' range.

Starting the game and entering a mission could be completed in a few seconds, and the in-game action demanded more situational awareness than outright flying skill.

This resulted in a game that was much more approachable than its more complex follow-ons, and Hellcats was widely enjoyed by players that would not normally play flight simulators.

This method of access allowed the card to continually refresh the screen without interrupting the CPU; if the two shared the memory directly, it can lead to contention issues that will slow overall performance.

At the time, this sort of rendering was common, and with this engine many more polys could be drawn per-frame, greatly increasing visual fidelity.

Parker had always been interested in flight simulators and started adapting the basic graphics engine as the core of a new game.

Working at home at nights after his day job, he began the process of converting the workstation engine to a PC platform in his new company, Parsoft.

At lower resolutions the amount of data that had to move over the bus was limited in any case, so the "brute force" approach of drawing every frame to the buffer would work fine, and did for contemporary games like Red Baron.

In addition to having higher resolution than contemporary PC's, it was not uncommon to see more than one monitor attached to a Mac, especially in the desktop publishing market.

The game is focused on the battle between the F6F Hellcat and A6M Zero that first took place over these islands, whose outcome changed the balance of air power in the Pacific war.

These objects were placed throughout the very large map area, so if the player ignored the mission and flew off to distant islands, they would still find operational airfields.

Additionally, the only structural limits the game checked on were the landing gear or direct impact, so for instance the flaps would not be damaged by lowering them at high speed.

This led to a number of behaviors that would be impossible otherwise, notably dive bombing at hundreds of miles an hour followed by dropping the flaps to allow a multi-tens-of-gee pullout.

Settings for sound and graphics were likewise accessed entirely though the standard Mac menu and dialog system.

In comparison, games like Red Baron had hundreds of missions, and while they played exactly the same every time, there were so many of them there was less of a problem with lack of novelty.

Aware that the major problems in the original engine were the lack of realistic structural physics and pilot effects, Parsoft's new A-10 Attack!

The VBE system was used by Parsoft to produce A-10 Cuba, a new mission set taking place at and around Guantánamo Bay.

VBE was replaced by a much simpler system, OpenPlane, that allowed all of the customization to be carried out in resource files with no coding or compiling required.

Power Unlimited gave a review score of 95% writing: "Other flight simulators dwarfed Hellcats over the Pacific when it came out.