Red Baron

About Red Baron

Red Baron (1981) is Atari's first-person vector-graphics biplane combat game, built alongside Battlezone on similar hardware, which flopped in arcades but inspired Sid Meier and Bill Stealey to found MicroProse's first game.

Red Baron in Depth

The player is a World War I ace flying a biplane for the Allies, in a game named after the nickname of German ace Manfred von Richthofen. It is divided into rounds, most split between air combat against one to three planes in formation and ground combat against two zeppelins and various ground targets, including pillboxes, turrets and buildings. Flight physics are not accurate, and the plane cannot be crashed directly into the ground, but the vector mountain ranges are solid, so flying into them costs a life, although shots pass straight through them in both directions.

The game adjusts its own difficulty, keeping a consistent average game time across the last 32 games played; its non-volatile memory stores the top three scores and the average game times, so that it adapts to the typical player at each location and avoids excessively long games. Like Battlezone, developed at the same time, it uses monochrome vector graphics, a first-person view and extra hardware for the 3D calculations.

Making Red Baron

Atari, Inc. developed Red Baron and released it in arcades in 1981. Electronic Games reported that it was not successful despite its "gorgeous quadra-scan graphics and magnificent audio frills", and hoped that "this marvelous flight simulator with a combat theme will re-emerge in home format some day". Its biggest influence came from a single session: while playing it in 1982, Bill Stealey and Sid Meier decided to create what became MicroProse's first game, Hellcat Ace. Red Baron was later included in Atari: 80 Classic Games in One! for Windows, Atari Anthology for the Xbox and PlayStation 2, and Atari Greatest Hits Volume 2 for the DS, and the arcade version is available on the AtGames Legends Ultimate cabinet.