COLUMN ONE : Top Guns Soar in Cyber-Sky : 'Blue Baron,' 'Mongrel' and other flight simulation junkies enjoy the thrill of aerial combat. The right software, a vibrating chair and a cockpit made from an old car can bring daring dogfights into your home.

By MARTHA GROVES

Jan. 6, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Stanton Perry grew up listening to his father’s tales about ferrying planes across the Atlantic in World War II. He would have followed in Dad’s contrails had it not been for myopia. So he indulges his fancy for flying in another way.

Each morning, he slips into the harness of his $400 flight chair, reaches for his $110 joystick, plants his feet on his $150 rudder pedals, grasps his $125 weapons-control system, cranks up his $230 subwoofer-enhanced speakers, ogles his $3,000 video display--and takes to the cyber-skies.

Perry, of Monarch Beach, is a “sim head,” one of the growing squadrons of Top Gun wanna-bes--all but a fraction of them male--who devote every spare moment and then some to playing flight-simulation games on their desktop computers.

Once the domain of an elite corps with high-end computer equipment and budgets to match, flight sim has become the best-selling segment of entertainment software, thanks to powerful and relatively cheap multimedia tools that bring to life the drone of the P-51 Mustang and the shriek of the F-18 Hornet. Blood-and-gore action games might come and go, but flight sims routinely rule the Top 10 lists.

What on Earth is behind this urge to wing it?

It’s the mythology and romanticism of flight and air combat. “The last warrior who had control of his fate to a large degree was the fighter pilot,” said Jonathan Baron (a.k.a. Blue Baron), a developer of combat simulation games. “He has that aura about him.”

There is also that “spiritual feeling” that people--particularly men--have toward flight, he said. “I don’t think a woman will ever understand the way a man can love an airplane. It’s a holy relic.”

Sim junkies are competing on-line, subscribing to flight-sim magazines, joining clubs, attending conventions, sporting call signs like Reckless, Sniper and Mongrel and spending evenings being bounced around at home or in cockpits at such sim-based amusement centers as Fightertown and Magic Edge, where instructors track the action from full-blown control towers.

With a few clicks of a flight stick or keyboard, players can re-enact the London Blitzkrieg or pretend to be a Darth Vader lieutenant a la “Star Wars.” For the nonbellicose, Flight Simulator by Microsoft--the best-selling sim ever--offers views of the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower as the civilian pilot soars over New York or Paris.

The sim craze is big business for game companies, many of which will be displaying their new CD-ROM simulation titles at the Consumer Electronics Show, opening today in Las Vegas. It’s also creating sky’s-the-limit opportunities for companies like ThunderSeat and ThrustMaster that make gear--including vibrating chairs and $3,000 cockpits--for desktop aviators.

Small wonder that the embattled spouses of these digital dogfighters label themselves “sim widows.”

It’s Thursday night. Neil (Waxer) Johnston, 41, a simulations-product manager at Spectrum HoloByte, munches vegetarian pizza and sips Cabernet at his home in Milpitas, southeast of San Francisco. Then he sits down at his rudder pedal- and flight stick-equipped roll-top desk to practice what he preaches all day long at his Alameda-based games company: the joy of sim.

Piled on the floor and on bookcases are the 40 or so flight-sim games he has amassed since the 1980s. One of his favorites is Spectrum HoloByte’s Falcon 3.0, a veteran title with out-of-date graphics but top-notch game play--and a 342-page manual. (More than 700,000 copies of Falcon have sold since 1989, in an industry where 100,000 copies mark a success.)

Donning a headset, Johnson phones a sim partner, Larry, in nearby Mountain View and asks: “Can you go up?” At the rate of $3 an hour, they log on to the GEnie on-line service to play Air Warrior. This multi - player game, deemed by many to be the pinnacle in air-to-air combat sims, draws 7,000 aficionados who dial in from all over the world.

In short order, Johnston’s Focke-Wulf 190 “waxes” (shoots down) an enemy Spitfire. “Victory is sweet,” he says. “It’s the guy who got me last time.”

Sim junkies grew up zooming around the back yard with arms outstretched and generally share a lifelong fascination with military aviation. They like the idea of hunting a “bandit” and wasting him--virtually. Some have fathers, uncles and brothers who were fighter pilots. Many fly real Cessnas or gliders but crave the high jinks and fast action of mano-a-mano battle--without having to risk their limbs, of course.

“We like the word kill in the military sense,” said Tim (Ace) Timmerman of Fountain Valley. “But it’s not that war is to be glorified.”

Flight sim was launched in the early 1980s with games featuring primitive aircraft and stilted action. Then came Falcon. And by the late 1980s, improvements in resolution, color, graphics and sound had helped launch a veritable fleet of games.

Electronic Arts came out with titles featuring the legendary Chuck Yeager as flight instructor. World War I and World War II air-combat sims followed, including, from “Star Wars” director George Lucas’ empire, Battlehawks 1942, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe and Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain.

In most games, landscapes and skies still tend to be fairly crude and geometrical, but a few offer astonishing detail, down to wispy clouds and richly textured islands where cruise ships are moored with ropes. Execute a banking maneuver, and the pilot sees different views of his plane’s exterior, as well as ever-shifting terrain. In truly sophisticated games, sunset darkens into night, and buildings cast appropriate shadows depending on the time of day and the pilot’s latitude and longitude.

A few times a year, Air Warrior, the on-line game, re-enacts battles in real time. Pilots fly across the English Channel, say, from France to London. Once shot down, the pilot is out of the action.

“It might take you 90 minutes to fly over, but the fight is over in two or three minutes,” said Johnston, the Spectrum HoloByte sim freak. “Your hands get real sweaty.”

To prepare, novice warriors go through seven weeks of training. They do homework by electronic mail and sit through on-line lectures. Then everybody takes to the virtual skies to practice.

Flight sims are generally much tougher to learn than the adventure and action games favored by children. The uninitiated who venture in without preparation face merciless taunting and months of “dying right and left,” as one player put it.

Air Warrior’s following “has exploded in the last couple of years,” said Baron, a software developer for Kesmai (pronounced Kez-migh), the Charlottesville, Va., company that created the game. It has attracted doctors, lawyers, pilots, mechanics and truck drivers--not to mention the attention of Rupert Murdoch, whose media giant News Corp. bought the company last May and is funding its rapid growth.

The 510th Tactical Fighter Wing (named, as are many electronic flight clubs, for the area code of its members) is on hiatus, having burned out on Falcon 3.0. But at its peak the Bay Area club drew 25 men one Saturday each month to a San Mateo hotel, where they would play from 10 a.m. till midnight on the PCs they schlepped from home.

“We’d kiss our wives goodby and go off to meet the wizard,” says Bryce (Striker) Whitlock, 37. “We’ve certainly taxed our relationships.”

The club’s 1993 Simcon convention drew 100 simmers who competed for trophies, listened to lectures on tactics and visited vendors’ booths.

Whitlock’s club experience eventually got him hired at Spectrum HoloByte as director of information systems. Complaints from his wife--and the birth of his now 2-year-old son--prompted Whitlock to curtail his simming. Besides, he’s itching for some new challenges.

“All of us are searching for the one game that will bring it all together,” he says.

Eric (Reckless) Pearson keeps tabs on the 2,500 subscribers who pay $20 a year for his 3 1/2-year-old flight simulation magazine, Intercept. The mean age is 37; 34% served in the military.

Pearson works 60 hours a week at his real job, as a quality-assurance engineer for a plastics company. His wife, Elaine (Amazon) Zacharczenko, is a pharmacist. Together, they put out six Intercept issues a year from their Kingston, N.Y., home. Pearson’s widely read game reviews are based on at least 50 hours of late-night playing time in his home cockpit, fashioned from a Subaru sports car seat.

“I occasionally get into a flight suit when I’m having trouble with motivation,” Pearson said.

Whereas he focuses on actual games, Zacharczenko has made a name for herself as a sort of amateur psychologist. Her column, “Words of Wizzo-dom,” has won a following among sim widows. In one, she offered warning signs for women who fear they might be dating a serious hobbyist: He owns a flight jacket, flight gloves, aviator sunglasses and a pair of silk boxers with jet fighters on them. She herself was alerted by her husband’s license plate frame: “Too close for missiles. Switch to guns!”

Many sim-heads also trade tips on-line. Peter (Rogue Leader) Simmons, 22, whose “nice, thick glasses” put an end to his flying dreams, plays out his fantasies as a system operator, or “sysop,” on CompuServe’s Flight Simulation Forum.

Simmons, who lives in the Atlanta area, set up an on-line role-playing and fan club for devotees of LucasArts’ “Star Wars” simulations: X-Wing and TIE Fighter. He figures he plays five hours a week but discusses the games for 15 or 20 hours with forum participants.

“I’m in it for the social part,” he said, “more than how did you kill this particular thing.”

Simmons said he would be delighted if half the people who played were women. But, he notes, “they’re just not interested.”

Getting a handle on the size of the flight sim market is tricky. Carl Knoch, marketing research manager for MicroProse, a game company in Hunt Valley, Md., owned by Spectrum HoloByte, figures that, broadly defined, the market stretches to half a million households. Of those, perhaps 100,000 to 150,000 are hard-core sim heads, with many of them paying $40 to $60 for any game that hits the shelves.

Knoch estimates that flight sim games accounted for one-fifth of the $540 million in PC entertainment software retail sales in 1994, making it the top category, ahead of adventure, strategy, action and sports games. Microsoft says Flight Simulator 5.0, the most recent upgrade, has sold more than 400,000 units at retail in the United States since late 1993.

Spectrum HoloByte hopes to push flight sim into the mainstream with a new Top Gun game, based on the movie that starred Tom Cruise as a cocky Navy ace. It will be previewed at CES and is due in stores this year. The company also is upgrading Falcon, with the help of a former Defense Department programmer--an interesting example of defense conversion.

When Buzz Hoffman, a retired Air Force fighter pilot who served in Vietnam, helped launch a company to make programmable joysticks for sim enthusiasts, he figured it might sell 10,000 to gadget freaks over five years. Now, 500,000 flight sticks later, “we’re wondering when it’s going to stop,” said Hoffman, 49.

ThrustMaster Inc., based near Portland in Tigard, Ore., also makes rudder pedals and, for the truly obsessed, $3,000 cockpits. Most of those get sold to the U.S. and Canadian military or to defense contractors, Hoffman said, although “a lot of people call and charge them on their credit cards.”

In the last year, ThunderSeat Technologies, a Marina del Rey company started by a former doctor, has sold about 10,000 chairs in which a subwoofer speaker generates vibrations that give new meaning to the word rumble seat. Other accessories include side consoles that hold the stick and throttle and a keyboard holder that pivots like a dentist’s tray.

Thanks in part to sales to a big Las Vegas hotel, growth has been greater than expected, said president Pat Hunt, who founded ThunderSeat when he got tired of working at a hospital every day.

Next up for ThunderSeat will be a chain of $1.5-million sim-based entertainment centers, being developed in partnership with a San Diego venture firm. ThunderSeat will program the software and build cockpits and other accessories for the centers.

The first is scheduled to open in July in San Diego, with others in Los Angeles, the Southeast and possibly Toronto and Montreal.

They will vie with existing “experience software” centers, such as Magic Edge in Mountain View and Fightertown in Lake Forest, Calif., where individuals and groups, many sporting flight suits and goggles, pay $1 a minute to be virtual pilots.

“We think it’s going to be the entertainment center for the ‘90s,” Hunt said.

Stan (Hazard) Perry’s obsession with flight doesn’t stop at his $4,000 home sim setup. He and his buddy, (Ace) Timmerman, travel by motor home to air shows and space shuttle landings. Soon they’ll head to Kissimmee, Fla., where they’ve given each other rides in a WWII-vintage P-51 Mustang for their birthdays.

Maybe the sense of adventure comes from Perry’s forebear, Commodore Perry, the War of 1812 naval hero.

Whatever, Perry says, flight sim “is definitely a passion.” Now if only that $100 flight suit he has on order would arrive . . .