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The flight sim that sold fine and still helped sink its studio

Looking Glass lost the programmer behind the first game's fluid-dynamics engine, so the sequel's physics had to be written from scratch — and the team used the reset to abandon aerobatics entirely for ordinary civilian flying over the San Francisco Bay. It worked: critics praised the simulated airspace, the game earned back its costs, and the reward was that the team split in two to build a third flight sim and a combat game at once. Both projects went badly, and the studio behind Thief and System Shock closed in May 2000. It's a compact case study in how a modest success can be the worst thing that happens to a development team.

The player's plane shares the sky with as many as 600 AI aircraft, all sequenced by air traffic control running in real time.

Read the whole of Flight Unlimited II on Wikipedia

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