Wings | CorporateIntel

Like most business leaders these days, I am obsessed with the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. Not a day goes by without the promise or threat of AI dominating the headlines. There is insurmountable prognostication from pundits on all sides of observation — thinkers, doers, computer scientists, investors, executives, academics, journalists, policy-makers, and just regular folks — about where AI will lead, with or without direct human control.

As always, my core belief is that technology advances faster than our ability to understand its social implications. This is also another one of those situations where it is impossible to say if anyone can paint a clear and true picture of what we’ll see on the road ahead, be it five, ten, or a hundred years from today.

This for me has become a Wright Brothers moment. What I mean by that is trying to imagine what the Wright Brothers might have thought about where their first powered flyer might lead in the ensuing hundred years. Although they understood the potential military applications of flight, they couldn’t have imagined the 37-hour round-trip path of the recent B2 intercontinental bombing mission. They couldn’t have imagined commercial flights filling up daily at relatively low cost with endless travelers. They couldn’t have envisioned space travel with or without humans to the moon, Mars, or beyond our own galaxy.

I’m familiar with the Wright Brothers story as it was foundational to the first storytelling project I joined to bring to life in technology, a very early computer game called Wings. That game followed the life of a young pilot in World War I, an extremely rudimentary military use of aeronautics long beyond the imagination of the innovators Wilbur and Orville Wright. The success of the Kitty Hawk biplane experiment in 1903 led to armed aircraft and pilots fighting each other in flight a decade later. That was an early twentieth-century sign of how fast technology would evolve from concept to unplanned implementation.

The more I study AI and approve early-stage projects where it is being applied to our business, the more I am convinced we are in a Wright Brothers moment. Virtually no one reading this blog will be around in a century to either say “I told you so” or gasp at the outcome of where machine learning, large language models, generative AI, or agentic adoption will take us. It would be like the Wright Brothers on that remote North Carolina beach envisioning a frequent flyer program and pre-ordering their inflight meal — or trying to picture an aircraft carrier at sea, or a massive rocket lifting into the air and landing again on its base.

Futurists may try to see through a crystal ball, but we all know that’s mostly a fool’s errand. What we may think the history of science will bring and what it actually delivers are almost impossible to reconcile within a lifetime, let alone beyond a lifetime.

I felt similarly when I bought my first personal computer in the mid-1980s at the beginning of my career, mostly to use as a word processor. That was a few years before a small team of collaborators built that WWI game called Wings. In those few years following the first monochrome monitor on my desktop, we created a brightly colored rendering of a three-dimensional flight simulator at extraordinarily low cost and sold at a similarly attractive consumer price point. I thought to myself, where will this exponential compounding take us in the tangible decades ahead of me?

The quantitative advances in processing instructions were already staggering. We had just bought new computers with 20mb hard drives and the Holy Grail of local storage appeared to be CD-ROM. That was before the commercial internet, before broadband, before widely available cellphones, and long before any kind of advanced mobile device in your hand that could access and display unlimited high-definition video. No one could have pictured an iPhone, not even Steve Jobs.

All of that pales in comparison to what I think AI will bring. I’m trying to envision the world in a decade, in two decades, which hopefully I will see. A hundred years from now, what will be the human experience? What is the equivalent of boarding a plane with 400 other passengers for a flight of several hours across an ocean and hoping to get upgraded versus waiting in line at a port hoping to find passage on a steamship for a week or two of unsteady seas?

Together we are sharing a Wright Brothers moment. We’re on a windy shoreline, staring in awe at an ingeniously designed, materially fragile, heavier-than-air, modestly motor-powered, fancy bit of kite architecture, equipped to carry a single passenger off the ground for about 12 seconds.

What this means is that we are about to fly.

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Photo: Pixabay

A few decades back, before I became a software and media executive and long before I returned to writing, I wrote the “screenplay” for a succesful computer game called Wings. That “interactive movie” — as it was marketed — was a World War I flight simulation that followed the lives of the very first fighter pilots, trying to make combat sense of fragile biplanes curiously equipped with machine guns. It was published by an early innovator in gaming known as Cinemaware, which set out to make games look, feel, and tell stories more like movies. Recently the Cinemaware brand was resurrected via a Kickstarter campaign to fund a mobile version of Wings, that if successful will contain the entirety of the many pages of story and dialogue, plus a lot of new material. I have no financial interest in the new Wings, but it does bring back fantastic memories, a slice of life from an earlier time. The new team asked me to do a text interview to support their campaign, which I decided for nostalgia to publish here as well. Enjoy!

Please provide a brief bio of yourself.

At the moment I’m a first time novelist, my book This is Rage: A Novel of Silicon Valley and Other Madness just released last month to good reviews. I’m also an investor, a start-up board member, an executive coach instructor, a blogger, and former corporate executive. I was CEO of SHOP.COM, Executive VP of Disney Online, and VP Entertainment and Education at Broderbund Software. I read a lot, follow the L.A. Dodgers, study wine, and am active in children’s welfare issues as well as local government. If that’s not brief enough, cut everything except the part about reading and the Dodgers.

How did you originally join Cinemaware and get to work on Wings?

I met some of the Cinemaware team at a UCLA conference called The Future of Television in the late 1980s. They told me they were creating interactive movies. I had just written a spec screenplay called Miniatures about radio controlled model aircraft that sort of predicted the U.S. drone program. It was the first thing I had written on a computer, a monochrome XT. They asked me if I ever thought about working on a computer game. I said No. They showed me Rocket Ranger and It Came from the Desert on the Amiga. Then I said Yes. Quickly.

How was it working with the Wings team on the Amiga? What do you remember most about that time?

It was a magical time, a time of possibilities. I had experienced five years in traditional media of hearing why we couldn’t do certain things, how everything had to be done a rigid way, and how little respect there seemed to be for the writer. Everything at Cinemaware was, yeah, let’s try that and see if we can make it work, why not? I also remember writing on a Mac SE/30 for the first time, and I couldn’t believe why anyone would use anything other than that — so much for my XT. And I remember when our competitor, Origin Systems, leaked a demo of their outer space saga Wing Commander, and our team was like, hmm, that’s a pretty compelling 3D engine, but our story is way better, so back to the drawing board, and they completely rewrote our flight simulator in about 2 weeks to be more state of the art. Oh, and I remember when someone brought in the first Amiga with a 20MB hard drive and we could install both floppy disks without having to play with disk swapping or a slow seeking second external floppy drive, and that just seemed like the best possible gaming experience you could ever have — until we heard rumor about something coming called a CD-ROM.

How did you go about doing research for the game?

John Cutter, the game’s visionary designer, and I got ourselves invited backstage at the Air & Space Archives in San Diego, where we discovered a lot of the old U.S. Army Air Corp files were stashed. We were blown away by how welcomed we were there, the military librarians spent hours with us digging out old files, it was a smorgasbord of history, and they couldn’t have been more helpful. They kept bringing out boxes and boxes of dusty old papers and black & white photographs and let us have at it. It was a super find and let us dig deep into a very special time of innovation, courage, and pain. We devoured stacks of books on World War I (we even included a bibliography in the Aviator’s Briefing Manual, I’m guessing the first bibliography for a computer game). We watched the 1927 silent movie Wings — winner of the first Academy Award for Best Picture — and The Dawn Patrol (1930) so many times on VHS by our QA release date I think we could recite the storylines in realtime without anything on the monitor — then we chose to borrow only the atmosphere: the title, the sets, the costumes, font styles from the text cards, but none of the stories or characters.

What do you think makes Wings such a special gaming experience?

I think it really was the first computer game to try to tell an epic story that was more theater than shoot ’em up, but we kept plenty of shoot ’em up. We tried extremely hard to make the character role-playing real, to get inside the head of a 19-year-old kid who probably had about as much chance coming home alive as he did surviving enough sorties to live long enough to become squadron commander. We obsessed on details of the period, used every pixel wisely, created a true sense of responsiveness in the story, something that would set off endless discussions about the true nature of interactivity. We also kept the game controls immensely simple. It wasn’t a super complex gravity based simulation where you had to be an engineer to takeoff and land the plane or fight virtual physics to keep the contraption airborne. We simply “cut to” you in the air and said Just Fly and Shoot. We brought in a lot of non-gamers with that simplicity, but funny enough, the hard-core gamers praised us for it as well.

Can you tell us what the team wanted to implement in the game, but didn’t have the time or resources to do? Any special hidden gems or trivia for Cinemaware fans?

First you have to remember what we were dealing with getting the game to ship on two 512K floppy disks, as if any big blockbuster developer today could comprehend how little data that is. Our programmers were masters of compression, and kept squeezing and squeezing. The music was astonishingly intelligent, but the short redundant loops made our composers crazy, so I’m sure they will be delighted with the enhanced score on the remastered version. Every screen shot was a big hit to storage, and I remember the artists begging to include more storyboards, but that wasn’t possible. Luckily for me text was as economical to store then as it is now, so I didn’t feel the same thrashing. I do remember the branching tree logic making me nuts and having to write multiple outcomes for every mission, wondering if it was humanly possible to cover every fork in the story and how many people would care that on a given pass through the game they would only see fractions of the screenplay (we positioned this as a customer benefit, creating replay value). I remember when the marketing folks “requested” we cut from three floppy disks in beta down to two in order to improve gross margin on wholesale, which almost created a revolution in the hallways. Our indefatigable producer, Jerry Albright, reminded us it was OK for them to ask, and that we had to respect them for trying, then emphatically told them not a chance. Then somehow our miracle programmers pulled it off and we shipped the master on Reel 1 and Reel 2. I also remember a few brainstorms we had after we realized what a unique product we had developed, one for a CD-ROM version with recorded spoken dialogue that of course never happened, and one for a Wings sequel that would have been set in WWII, and who knows where that would have taken us.

If Cinemaware had a chance to expand on Wings, what do you think could be better developed or explored?

That’s sort of like asking the creative team who made the original movie version of Wings how they would have made it a talkie. The remastered version being funded on Kickstarter is doing all the right things — improved graphics, enhanced music, more missions, improved physics in the engine — all of that brings out the best in what we did so long ago. The important thing is that we gave the game heart, layered grounding in reality staying true to the source material, emotional resonance woven through a role-playing experience. As long as you remain true to heart, the polished production values will fully bring out the best.

Ken, you also pledged for this campaign, thank you so much for the support. What made you do it?

It is a very small sum of money to let an entirely new generation of gamers see where we started as an industry, and maybe a few grown-up parents will get to share the experience with their kids. Really, it’s not much money for a lot of game, and it is a fun game, part of what got us here. It’s kind of like the silent movie version of Wings we watched over and over — what if someone hadn’t bothered to preserve it, can you imagine having lost a gem like that? I can’t, no way. We all come from somewhere, it’s important to remember that and even more important to share the memories.