Learning how to fly in video games

I was fascinated by flight before hand, but it was Astro Boy that solidified what flight was in my mind. Here was a boy capable of the most improbable thing in the world accomplishing it with a minimum of fuss. I was attracted to the thrill of flight rendered the exact same way me and everyone else my age were doing it: arms stuck out in front of us and running around the school yard screaming. Well, maybe not the screaming part. Astro Boy took all the really lame things we were doing out in the backyard and made them look cool. Flight finally felt achievable.

So it was that, like most things in my life, I sought to find my joys and fears in video games. I didn’t want much from a game in this regard. I just wanted to fly. I didn’t want to be in a plane, I wanted to be the plane. The best flight-based games are the ones that celebrate flight, free from the technicalities of how flight is achieved in the first place. I wanted to fly around and look at all the little things beneath me without concerns.

Kirby’s Adventure was the first game to scratch that itch and remains the closest realization of the dreamlike simplicity of flight I cherish. The pink puffball’s ability to fly renders traditional platforming paradigms irrelevant. When you can float over any tricky jumps with ease, you don’t have to worry about, well, platforms. You don’t have to worry about anything, really.

Every now and then you hop on a shooting star and soar through the sky, blazing past all the cute little monsters beneath you and taking in the scenery seemingly ripped from a pleasant dream. At the very end of the level, Kirby tumbles onto an oversized trampoline and is tossed up into the atmosphere. You get a 1UP if you reach the stratosphere.

 
It’s not a difficult game, nor does it ever aspire to one. The beauty of Kirby’s Adventure is in how it celebrates flight, erasing all degree of challenge to accommodate the simple pleasure of soaring through the air. Why do we want games to prevent our enjoyment of such an impossible dream with a relentless difficulty?

Flight is escapism. Attempts to rationalize an impossibility is like waking up from a pleasant dream. It’s unwanted.

Even the series that get it right sometimes trip up along the way. It’s why Super Mario Bros. 3 and the raccoon tail are remembered fondly while the cape in Super Mario World wallows in hazy memories. The raccoon tail lets Mario uncover secret areas by floating through the air with little complications or a mastery of the controls. The cape is more about catching the wind and using it to propel you upwards, there’s more substance to the mechanic. Both approaches encourage exploration by freeing Mario from the confines of gravity, but the raccoon tail lets even the more challenged players plant that tricky landing. Your efforts to “escape” the levels with the cape often lead to repeated, crushing failure.

The cape in Super Mario World has one advantage over the the raccoon tail, though: speed. If Kirby demonstrates the joy of absent-mindedly floating through the sky like a hot air balloon, Mario runs with the concept of speed in flight. Super Mario 64 celebrates the physicality of flight with a system akin to skydiving. The Wing Cap lets Mario dive and pull back to get a burst of speed while flying, similar to the measured “dips” of the cape in Super Mario World. Coupled with the personal, over-the-shoulder camera positioning, flight is tactile and intimate. And if you can’t come to grips with the controls, well, you can always shoot yourself out of a cannon and enjoy Mario’s lazy arc through the air before plummeting back to the ground.

But these are all strict interpretations of what I wanted to be more freeing. Kirby’s Adventure tickled my fancy by letting the childhood dream of flight inform its difficulty level, but it’s still a very structured game with goals and objectives like Mario. It wasn’t what I was after.

I eventually found my unashamedly open flight game inside one of the most closed. Pilot Wings 64 is an exercise in mashing the exuberance of Mario with a flight simulator. Each vehicle demands a deft touch in order to get anywhere in the game but you’re still required to fly through giant floating rings in the sky, and even blow up a giant robot at one point. This is Nintendo, after all. Pilot Wings 64 is the polar opposite of Kirby’s Adventure in terms of difficulty. You can only fly under strict conditions and there’s a harsh penalty if you don’t do things correctly. If you dig a little deeper, though, there’s an unusually free-form playground called Bird Man mode.

In Bird Man mode, you’re strapped to a Davinci-esque flying machine and asked to fly around the map. You can take photos of the various natural structures and man-made objects around the world but you’re by no means encouraged to. There’s no machine powering your flight, no dwindling fuel meter to worry about, and no timer slowly ticking down to end your aimless voyage. The only thing that can stop you is a sudden bump into a wall or other hard object, which happens more often than not because of a curiosity to explore a small cave lodged inside a mountain.

With no goal in sight, little obstacle courses start forming in your mind. How close can you skim the rivers that twist down from the mountainside? Starting from the tip of the mountain, you dive down and notice how quickly you spiral out of control. The sudden drop makes fine control difficult and a stray button press can push you in an awkward direction to crash into a sharp rock. You pull back, slowing your descent and giving you a moment to adjust to the unpredictable forces ahead. You finally reach the end, slip over the edge of a waterfall, yank back a little too soon and freak out as you hit the bottom of a nearby bridge, tumbling into the deep, foggy blue of a Nintendo 64 ocean. Maybe you should have stayed up on the mountain top a little bit longer before acting on this mad plan.

It’s an experience divorced from reality and yet a part of it. You obviously can’t fly with a pair of wings strapped to your arms no matter how hard you try, but there’s nothing disconnecting you from the sensation of flight. There is no plane – you’re flying. It’s as satisfying as getting a pink thing to puff up its cheeks and float around a world. You want that freedom to do something so impossible. It’s envious. It’s intoxicating to even have that chance to experience it.

Getting the opportunity to fly in a video game is like a double whammy of escapism. We’re already overwhelmed by the possibility of simply playing a video game. Let us figure out the flying part by ourselves. We’ll be entertained.

Illustration by Jake Lawrence.