Flights Of Fancy

The developer of an extraordinary new simulation game, produced with the tacit consent of Israel's Air Force, hopes that all future Middle Eastern dogfights will be played out on computer screens

GRIPPING THE STICK OF MY trusty Israel Air Force F-15, I check the numbers flashing across my heads-up display, release the brakes, nudge back on the throttle and taxi down the runway. After 13 years of smog-busting breezes wafting through my backyard from Malibu, it's great to breathe those familiar high-test fumes out of the Ramat David airbase again. Well, not quite; computer games haven't reached the virtual-odor stage yet. But it's almost as if they've actually let the likes of me climb into the cockpit of a real jet fighter. Lifting off for the first leg of my warm-up mission, I bank west toward Kibbutz Hazorea, where I spent my youthful weekends recovering from the rigors of compulsory military service. The kibbutz's fish ponds glimmer in the sunlight just as I remember them. I feel the urge, however, to strafe the general vicinity of the cowshed. It took me far too many years to forget the sickly bovine aroma billowing into the prefab shack which was my living quarters.

Buzzing nearby Yokne'am with a sonic boom guaranteed to knock the fillings out of most people's teeth, I detour south and then east to my old base near Ramlah, intending to drop a 500-lb. bomb on the office of a self-inflated and vindictive adjutant who thought I'd taken the side of a rival officer. Lucky for Fat Shlomo, I lose control of the aircraft and hit a hillside somewhere, I think, near Latrun. There goes a $ 20-million machine. As a resplendent fireball quickly fills the screen of my computer monitor, I find myself understanding why, 20 years or so ago, the Air Force shrinks felt I'd do the country less harm in another branch of the army. Such reveries become commonplace when booting up Jane's Combat Simulations's long-awaited computer-game flight simulation, "IAF: Israeli Air Force." This is the only commercial combat "sim" in computer game history ever to attempt to model the military assets of an entire air force - and it's had the passive, if not the active, cooperation of the Israel Air Force. The game features the F-4 Phantom, the F-4 2000, the F-15i, the F-16 D, the Mirage III and the Kfir C-7. A couple of Russian Migs are included in the game's multiplayer mode. The only combat jet in the IAF's arsenal not modeled here appears to be the Skyhawk. This is more than compensated for by the opportunity gamers have to climb into the cockpit of Israel's stillborn next-generation fighter, the Lavi ATF, a multi-billion-dollar aircraft project cancelled in the late 1980s, before it hit the production line. Conceived and coded in Israel by Pixel Multimedia of Tel Aviv, for commercial reasons "IAF" bears the imprimaturs of the San Mateo, California subsidiary of the London-based Jane's Defense information publishing company, and of Electronic Arts. The game pushes the flight-sim envelope further than ever before. It runs on a dynamic terrain-generating software engine that transforms images taken from orbital satellite into a highly detailed topography distinguished by genuine elevation and real-life textures. The terrain isn't quite 3-D (though the aircraft and explosions are, if run on a computer using a powerful graphics accelerator). But "IAF" achieves an almost photo-realistic rendering of virtually every chunk of the Land of Israel. No other flight-sim has achieved anything quite this ambitious. With "IAF," jet-jockey wannabes can use their PCs to fly the full length and breadth of the country and its environs, dipping through real canyons, raising waves over the Kinneret, hugging highways or flying past such natural and manmade landmarks as Masada, the Haderah power plant, the docks of Ashdod, and the Dead Sea Works.

AFTER RECOVERING FROM MY own crash, I take off again, this time heading up the coast past the Rosh Hanikrah border station, into Lebanon, toward Beirut. Once there, I follow the Beirut-Damascus highway all the way to the Syrian capital which, by prior arrangement in the options menu, graciously refrains from opening up on me with anti-air missiles. There is snow on the hills as I head south toward Amman. I would have continued on to Eilat, but I had forgotten to set the options menu at "unlimited fuel." According to Pixel CEO Ramy Weitz, I'm flying in good company. Computer-game enthusiasts, particularly in Israel, are using "IAF" both to relive the IAF's operational glories (the game features combat missions set against the 1967, 1973 and 1982 campaigns as well as a hypothetical, near-future dust-up with Egypt, Syria and Iraq) and also just to check out the local sights.

Alas, not all flight-sim enthusiasts have been quite as impressed by this topographical spectacle. An article in Computer Games magazine said it was "the ugliest game in the genre." The reviewer complained that, especially at low elevations, and especially with less powerful computers, the geography is rendered with a shimmering effect that many find disconcerting. "From lower altitudes," he wrote, "the terrain breaks up into a psychedelic palette of broad, shifting colors, as if God had made the world with fingerpaints. It appears as if Israel is indeed the Land of Milk and Honey, not to mention swirled ice cream and marble fudge cake." (Recognizing the problem, Pixel recently released a "patch," or software fix, that addresses this and several other glitches.)

Yet even Computer Games acknowledges the magnitude of Pixel's achievement. The game is eminently playable, it concludes, particularly over the Internet (at www.janes.ea.com), where players can link up for face-to-face or cooperative missions. And the reviewer ultimately decides he can even live with the graphics. "After playing for a while, you get used to them," he says. "They're new, they're unique and they're ugly, but they're ugly in a completely different way we've never seen before."

THE GAME IS THE RESULT OF A four-year effort by an Israeli animation and computer graphics company founded in 1991 by reserve Israeli pilots Weitz and Guy Poran. Pixel first made its name producing a multimedia CD-ROM called "The Dead Sea Scrolls Revealed," and later, as producer of the "Sports Illustrated Almanac" CD-ROM. In a telephone interview, Weitz, who now heads a company of more than 50, told The Report that he had wanted to design an Israeli Air Force simulation game as long as 10 years ago. The main impediment then, he recalls, was technical. "I was still in the Air Force then, and I thought the day would come when I would do a PC game on the IAF. It was clear to me, though, that the game would require special technologies." These technologies, says Weitz, first became available, or at least practicable, about four years ago, which was when he began to assemble his team and look for a publisher willing to distribute such a product. Many simulation developers recruit former pilots, tank commanders or submarine skippers to consult on matters of accuracy and realism. Weitz took matters a step further, hiring more than a dozen IAF reserve pilots to work with his programmers on a full-time basis. He asserts that the Air Force approved the project from the start, and that the pilots were all reservists who still fly once a week. "The point, however, was never to recreate the kind of simulators we ourselves trained on. Those were designed to make you sweat by throwing different emergency situations at you. From the outset, we wanted to make a game that was easy to learn and fun to play. It was relatively easy for us to recruit people willing to do this. We were the first company in Israel that was going to do a game like this and get it onto the shelves of North American software outlets CompUSA or Fry's," says Weitz. "For many pilots, moreover, this really was a dream come true. Here's a company that was doing something different. It's huge fun for a pilot who flies reserves once a week to return from the squadron and fly the rest of the week on computer. And in 1998, it's clear even to former pilots and aircraft designers that simulations like this are very serious." Weitz's timing, moreover, was abetted by the IAF's year-long observance of its own jubilee. The corps had already created a state-of-the-art, and astonishingly forthcoming site on the World Wide Web (www.iaf.co.il). Journalists who for years had suffered under the military censor's yoke found, for example, a map revealing the names and locations of all the IAF's bases, hitherto classified material. And the brass apparently also liked Weitz's idea of bundling the game with a gala multimedia overview and history of the IAF. And since he was one of the Air Force's own, Weitz understood the importance of not breaching security during this endeavor. He and his team worked closely and collaboratively both with IDF field security and with IAF archivists. "I was holier than the pope in matters of security," Weitz told the Report. "It was important to us to do things correctly and honorably, and that no one, at any level, develop the sense we were trying to sneak anything into the game that shouldn't be there. But we were amazed at how much the IAF was open and advanced in its thinking. We had to cut out far less than you would imagine." There have been detractors, though. One member of an Internet discussion group devoted to combat flight simulations urged a boycott of the game, and refused to play it even if it were free. Israel, he declared, was a "rogue nation, and I don't think anyone should play a game where an evil nation such as Israel is portrayed as a hero." But most gamers made short shrift of the IAF-hater, for mixing politics with flight simulations. And one cynic quipped, rather cruelly, that a flight-sim modeled accurately after an Arab air force would require the player to lose all his planes in a single afternoon. "I've played the terrorists' 'Rainbow Six,' the new Tom Clancy computer game," said another. "That doesn't mean I support Osama Bin Laden. I bought 'Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe' not because I'm a Nazi, but because I liked the game and recognized that in no way did it mean I supported the Nazi cause. Nor did I buy 'Panzer Commander' because I have a secret urge to blow up Russians … I'm able to recognize the difference between a statement of beliefs and a recreational activity."

The game appears to be doing well in North America. And in Israel, where Weitz is marketing a Hebrew version, he says "IAF" is already the top-selling PC game in the country's history. Pixel has released a number of software patches aimed at smoothing out some rough edges, even for people with more middling processors. "It was important for us to make a statement by bringing the game out, warts and all," Weitz told the Report.

Weitz says that IAF pilots like the game so much, they have established closed private networks on the Internet, over which to play it. Civilians, alas, are not welcome (and are urged to find participants at the Jane's web site - www.janes.com - instead). But Weitz hopes, eventually, to entice former and serving pilots from neighboring countries into the loop. "In my office," he told The Report, "I already have 20 boxes earmarked for members of the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian air forces. I just have to figure out a way to get them to the right people. "There's something genuinely utopian about this idea. My dream is to bring them here, either physically or via the Net, and fly with them and against them, in the common hope this game will be our final battleground."