I can't remember why I bought this game (I was in the middle of high school at the time), but I logged hundreds of hours in this game. It's hard to appreciate games from a generation before you because you've developed a certain expectation of how games are supposed to look, features you've come to expect in every game, etc. But there was really nothing like this game at the time. 3D games barely existed (they were mostly flight sims, as this game nominally is), but it had so much more. You have to remember that this was before the web (actually one year after its creation), and most people weren't on the Internet. Some of us nerds were on BBSes, Compuserve, etc. But discovery of new games came from gaming magazines, friends, and just going to the game store and seeing what was on the shelves (which, as I think about it, is probably how I ended up with it. I probably thought it looked cool on the shelf).

I don't really have a point, but this article brought back some memories of that time.