Falcon 4.0 is the last part of MicroProse's venerable Falcon game series.

Falcon 4.0 models F-16 Fighting Falcon very accurately; in fact, even when the game was published in late 1998 it's still among the most realistic F-16 sims.

F4 is finally seeming to form the Electronic Battlefield that the game designers at Microprose envisioned; In F4, the player is just a pilot, while the computer plays the war outside the flight simulation - at unit or strategic level, depending on the distance from the player.

Falcon 4.0's tale after the release was very very sad. Hasbro (MicroProse's owner) didn't think flight simulators were profitable enough, and due to fact that money doesn't grow in trees the Falcon design team was sent packing. No more flight sims because "people" seem to "want" burger games...

This was sad, because now MicroProse has finally made a great flight sim engine, but there's no game around it. No further enhancements to the basic Falcon 4.0; No follow-ups to it.

As the gesture of Honorable Development, the game development team released the 1.08 patch the day they left; and even afterwards they released patches for the game! Now that's what I call a good development team... =)

Just like with many other cool games, Falcon 4.0's source code got "leaked" to the Internet.

http://www.falcon4.com/ - be sure to check the "Statement to Microprose Fans".