«

[MrFlibble]

Recently I've been browsing (via the Wayback Machine) various archived pages of game developers and publishers from the nineties.

On the page of a German publisher, Ticsoft, a game caught my attention called StormFighter. By the look of the sole screenshot, it seems like a flight sim in the best tradition of the well-known titles from early/mid nineties:

Stormfighter

STORMFIGHTER is an arial fighting game. There is no necessity to ponder too much over the map or battle operations. A full speed attack on the ground and air opponents, even if they outnumber you, is just as much fun. Your flight experience is of essence and ... of course - sometimes you'll will need to come up with a clever plan to fullfill your mission.
The airplane in the game, is a fantasy flight machine, which can fly at very high speeds and is also capable of flying almost vertically up. Among your opponets there are some rather strange armoured machines - ELEFANKS, which till now were by any of the armies of the world.

Ticsoft's website has a downloadable German shareware version of the game: storm12.exe

I got interested and checked it out, and it plays as good as it looks - it's a fine example of an early nineties flight sim, albeit more inclined towards the arcade/action genre, but a sim nonetheless. To my disappointment, there was no info on the developer to be found, and clearly the game is quite obscure.

However, the developer is mentioned on the loading screen of the shareware version, and the company is called Maddox Games.

Now I'm not very familiar with the flight sims of late nineties and 2000's, but hardcore flightsim fans will have immediately recognized the company: Maddox Games is a well-known Russian developer who created the famous IL-2 Sturmovik. And StormFighter is, apparently, their very first flight simulation game - and a pretty good one I'd say

According to the company profile from the old Maddox Games website, StormFighter was only released in Russia in 1995 and in Germany in 1996, via Ticsoft. Apparently, there were no other official releases of this game.

Oh, and the ELEFANKS that are mentioned in the game description are actually AT-AT ripoffs, which is kinda cool