The insights and historical views of Aerobiz Supersonic
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Like many kids in 1990s Brazil, I didn’t have a cable subscription, so I only had access to basic television. Even though these channels showed cartoons, my Sunday mornings were filled by fishing and truck driving TV shows — and believe me, it was awesome to watch truckers discussing which were the best roads in the state. It was the talk of the town on Mondays at school.
Perhaps, the fondness I had for these TV shows that targeted a grown-up audience was determinant for me to develop another passion: playing simulators of all sorts. I’m going to talk about a game from Koei’s Executive Series, a miscellanea of business simulators based on trends like horse breeding and video cassete recorder production.
Most of these titles were only released in Japan. One exception, though, was the Aerobiz series, which focused on airline companies. Its second game, Aerobiz Supersonic (1993), released on Mega Drive and Super Nintendo, captivated me for a number of reasons. First of all, it gave the player four different scenarios of commercial aircraft history, comprised in 20 years each: 1955–1975, 1970–1990, 1985–2005 and 2000–2020. This way, the title provided the player with a wide range of airplane models she could buy for her company.
The most interesting part of these time periods, though, was the inclusion of real historical events as means of changing the economic balance and flight demand to certain destinations. Supersonic also tries to predict its own future in the last two scenarios — and its insights are something we can analyse today since we’re living in the game’s future.
Understanding the game
As an airline simulator, Aerobiz Supersonic puts the player in charge of multiple typical tasks of this business like opening new routes, buying and selling planes, sending representatives to negotiate new slots in airports, etc. The goal of each playthrough is to be the most successful airline in four different regions of the globe within 20 years — these being Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, Middle East, Europe, Oceania and North America. The player competes against three companies as she can measure her performance during quarterly reports after each round of actions is completed.
To achieve success, one must pay attention to an assortment of details: which aircraft is the most cost-friendly for each established route? Which business ventures — like hotels and shuttle services — should I invest in to potentialize my company’s income? Questions like these are frequent while playing Aerobiz Supersonic, and since the world is constantly changing within the game, the answers are also transforming themselves as you progress. In short, Supersonic tests your adaptability to the effervescence of geopolitics and business strategies throughout different eras.
Airlines and World History
As we’ve mentioned before, one of Aerobiz Supersonic’s most celebrated features is the use of historical events. Their application could be either as game changers or as simple parametrical elements of balancing. A lot of them were based on real facts, while some were random and hypothetical.
Basically, there are two kinds of events contained in the game. The first ones refer to the global geopolitical and economical situation of each scenario. For example, during the years when the world was divided by capitalism and communism, airlines based on NATO-affiliated countries couldn’t buy airplanes from Soviet manufacturers like Tupolev and Ilyushin. The opposite, regarding countries that signed the Warsaw Pact, is also true.
Of course, this situation is in constant transformation and closely resembles our real world many times. Tokyo’s population growth during the 1950s and 1960s or the rise of touristic destinations as Tahiti and French Polynesia are some of the notable world changes included in Supersonic.
The other kinds of historical events in Aerobiz Supersonic are widely announced during the beginning of each quarter and may suddenly change the geopolitical panorama, opposed to the progressive and natural development we’ve exposed before. Episodes like the Suez Crisis — referred as Middle East War II in-game — and the rise of Fidel Castro as Cuba’s new leader in 1959 are important for the fictional airline business. In the first example, chances are high that the player will lose a lot of passengers if she has a flight route destined to Cairo. Also, wars like this one increase oil price, therefore making fuel more expensive. When Cuba becomes a communist state, in opposition to US-friendly Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship, relations between North American or West European flight companies and the Cuban government become increasingly difficult.
The treatment to these events in Aerobiz Supersonic didn’t exactly have much depth since the game basically warned the player that something important happened and that the market should respond to it accordingly. Understanding how these facts affected my airline company, though, was something that demanded research and worked as a puzzle game on its own. In a sense, it instigated me to look further into these facts — the inclusion of the independence of countries like Tunisia and Fiji in the game made me read about about the malevolent effects of neocolonialism, something that is extremely relevant to our present due to the height of xenophobia and immigration issues in Europe.
On the other hand, I felt that my own country was underrepresented in Koei’s simulator. As a Latin American, I’ve always been aware of our social illnesses and, most importantly, why we still have to face them. My parents were activists against the Brazilian dictatorship, which put the country under a violent regime for 21 years (1964–1985). Because of that, I’ve been taught from a very early age not only about our own recent history, but also of neighboring countries like Argentina, Chile and Uruguay — which have dealt with similar situations. There’s absolutely no mention to these countries’ real history in the game and this frustrated me back then. Nowadays, it makes me think about the relevancy of facts for different people. September 11th marks an important date in the US calendar due to the terrorist attacks in 2001, but it is remembered in Chile as the day that president Salvador Allende was killed and replaced by iron fist dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Still, Koei could have been more diligent in their research. One of the hypothetical events in Supersonic is an devastating earthquake in Sao Paulo, something impossible due to Brazilian geography.
If Supersonic sometimes can reflect the real world with uncanny precision, its random events may cause a laugh now and then. Occasionally, a representative from a foreign country will ask the player if she wants to donate money for a certain cause. In exchange, the relationship between her company and that sovereign state will improve, making negotiations easier and quickier. Last time I’ve played, Iraq sent an agent to ask me to help them to develop alternative energy because importing oil was too expensive. Since Iraq’s oil reserves are one of the biggest in the world, the situation suddenly became comical.
Even though sometimes there’s the funny and unreal side to it, these pleads for help often brought up important questions to the player. In most cases, these representatives are sent to discuss means to reduce environmental damage with the airlines. They are often concerned with airport pollution, a real issue that is often regarded as a minor problem in urban areas. Since this wasn’t the game’s focus, these matters were pointed out briefly, but their inclusion was sufficient for me as a kid to be more conscious about our very own ecosystem. Let’s remember here these were the early 1990s, when environmental damage was a constant theme in the news — conventions like the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, were important at the time to bring awareness to the public. This panorama may have been crucial for the development team of Aerobiz Supersonic to include these questions in the game.
Supersonic Clairvoyance
In a similar way, Supersonic’s own present was important for the development of another relevant facet of the game: its fictional future. Since the title was released in 1993, the last two playable scenarios (1985–2005 and 2000–2020) are largely based on conjectures. In this sense, Koei looked to the future in an optimistic way.
During the fictional XXI century, the game implies that everyone is highly concerned with environmental damage by constantly asking the player to fund alternative fuel research. Unfortunately, the title’s prediction seems flawed as we notice that nature preservation has lost its space in media in the last years — eventually being replaced by social issues, which seem to be more urgent to our troubled times. One of the main criticisms towards the Bush administration during the US invasion of Iraq in global media was that the operation had been secretly motivated by the will of controlling oil wells in Middle East, for example. This points out our inability of predicting distant facts when we are biased by our own perception of the present.
Aerobiz Supersonic even failed to foresee the future of what it was supposed to understand the best: the aircraft business. The last scenario is called Supersonic Travel and is widely dominated by airplanes that can travel at the speed of sound. Again, none of this has happened in real life. To this day, only two supersonic civillian planes were used commercially: the French Concorde and the Russian Tupolev Tu-144. The Concorde was retired in 2003 by both Air France and British Airways after a tragic accident in Paris in 2000. Also, September 11th and high maintenance cost were determinative for its demise. The Daily Mail reports that the airplane may come back in 2019, though. The Tu-144 was retired in 1983, 17 years prior to its French counterpart’s withdrawal, due to its inefficiency as a commercial aircraft. It wasn’t a cost-friendly airplane and its noisy cabin was uncomfortable for the passengers.
Landing
As a simulator from the early 1990s, Aerobiz Supersonic still captivates me for its many small details — and every one of these were highly important for each playthrough. Apparently, one of the Executive Series’ goals was to instruct its players about the functioning of the market and its multiple trends. Even though I didn’t become a businessman when I grew up, this game’s subtle insights about the influence of geopolitics on global economy invited me to research these matters by myself. In a way, it had a certain impact on my own perception of history — even though it has its flaws. I’d only learn about many of the issues addressed by the game in school much later on. Also, the decisions I made based on its fictional geopolitical panorama reflected my point of view, and the results I received instigated me to try to understand why things went right or wrong, in other words, it helped me to develop both a sense of criticism towards the game and self criticism towards my actions.
Many years have passed since Aerobiz Supersonic was released, yet, its approach to modern history and the concept of causes and consequences in geopolitics has aged quite well. Global history has continued to be written and there are a lot of events that could be covered by current simulators. In this sense, I invite game developers to dive into Supersonic’s core mechanics and, perhaps, bring them into a new light — they still may enthrall someone out there.
