Video Game / Aerobiz

The sky is the limit.

Aerobiz was a Simulation Game made in 1992 by Koei, a company that is big on simulation games. The basic premise is you are starting a new international airline and you have to lead it to global dominance against three other competing airlines. The game provides a wide range of freedom and surprising level of depth and complexity for a 16-bit sim game with regards to business decisions and action as you expand from your home region across the world. The series was known as Air Management in Japan and there were three installments in the series:

• Aerobiz — released in 1992 on both Super NES and Sega Genesis
• Aerobiz Supersonic — Released in 1994 on both Super NES and Sega Genesis
• Air Management '96 — released in 1996 on Sega Saturn only in Japan

Each successive installment expanded gameplay by adding more aircraft, more cities and adding or refining features and interface. However, while the first installment is the most famous, the other two are nearly unheard of. As a player, you have control over routes flown, planes purchased, peripheral businesses bought, advertising, maintenance & service budgets, regional hub opening, and other business aspects. However, the game still subjects you to (mostly) historically accurate political and economic events (such as wars), natural disasters & weather effects, and random events (such as forced landings or crashes). For example, if playing as an airline in Moscow during any of the Cold War eras of play, the player would initially be restricted to buying only Soviet aircraft and be subject to major relations disadvantages in trying to open routes to Western cities.

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Aerobiz contains examples of:

• Alternate Timeline: In Aerobiz Supersonic, Norway, Ukraine, and even Russia will join the European Union.^note Back then, right now, and even in future predictions, just the idea of Russia joining the European Union is ABSOLUTELY UNTHINKABLE.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: The game restricts your airline to no more than 40 total routes.
• Artificial Stupidity: The AI will continue to purchase outdated, inefficient airliners even after newer, cheaper and more efficient planes are made available. It would regularly also place the largest, most inefficient airliners in its fleet on low density routes and then leave them there despite losing big bucks and its competition (you) opening the same route with a small, high efficiency airliner and turning a profit.
  • In one game, a computer invested all of its money in a charter company, sticking with it as the price crashed. The CEO was unsurprisingly fired. With it's new CEO and capital, it decided that the best plan of action was to put all of its money into THE EXACT SAME COMPANY.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The fictitious future aircraft in Aerobiz Supersonic tend to be VERY inefficient when compared to previous conventional models.
• Easy Logistics: You never have to worry about ensuring adequate ground support equipment is available for your airliners at their destinations, nor do you have to worry about flight scheduling, maintenance issues, etc...
• Failed Future Forecast: Supersonic predicted supersonic airliners and 1000+ passenger super-jumbo jets in the 2000's.
  • It also failed to portray a large number of very prominent cities that cropped up in the late 1990's & early 2000's, such as Dubai, UAE.
  • It also failed to portray the large scale move from regular airliners to smaller, more fuel-efficient Regional Jets for most small and medium-sized routes.
  • It also missed the terrible economic impact that the 2000's would have on airlines around the world.
  • On a lesser scale, it also predicted the next Airbus airliner would be the A350 (which is only now being conceptualized), and that McDonnell-Douglas would produce the early concept "MD-12" (a stretched MD-11) and still be an independent manufacturer.
  • It also made predictions that Norway, Ukraine, and Russia would join the European Union. All of which ended up being jossed by a thousand miles.
• Featureless Protagonist: You're the CEO of a major global airline. That's the one thing you know about the player, and it's all the info you need.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Supersonic featured "Glider", "Prop", "Jet", "Jumbo Jet", & "Supersonic" difficulties.
  • Non-Indicative Difficulty: Supersonic plays with this one. The first four difficulty levels determine the scenario goals, with each step up requiring dominance in one additional region, starting with four (rather, three plus your home region). However, the scenario goals are the same for all four players, thus while you have to dominate [X] regions against your competitors, so do they against you. Combined with Artificial Stupidity, this makes the middle difficulties a bit easier to prevent your opponents from winning as an astute player can easily block the others from getting enough regions to win, whereas the easiest level only requires any given airline - including that of your foes - to expand into a scant three regions that the others may not be able to reach and sufficiently develop in time.
    • This said, it gets a little harder again once you hit "Jumbo Jet" since you have to be the top dog in all seven regions, which by definition includes EVERY rival's home region, and you still have a limit of 40 routes and 80 turns in which to get the job done. Really, the farther you set the difficulty from Glider to Jumbo Jet, the harder it is for the opponents to win, but the easier it is for them to stop YOU from winning before the turn limit is reached, at which point the game still considers it a loss.
    • And all of this gets reversed in full at the highest difficulty, where the goals can't and don't change further, but the computer suddenly drops its Artificial Stupidity and gets serious about competing with the player.
• Instant-Win Condition: Regardless of size or overall passenger totals, the first airline to meet all the goals, wins. This can lead to some odd situations where a large airline, dominating the passenger totals, profits by big margins, loses to a much smaller airline that happened to dominate their home region and expand into three otherwise ignored regions. Less likely on higher difficulties due to the reasons mentioned above, but still.
• I Want My Jetpack: Some aircraft featured in the game were designs expected (by the dev team) to enter full production, but never even made it off the drawing board, such as the McDonnell-Douglas MD-12.
• Just Plane Wrong: Though most aircraft have historically accurate phase-in and discontinuation dates when available for the times, they don't feature accurate seating capacities or operational ranges, presumably for game balance.
• Karl Marx Hates Your Guts: Though you can sell old aircraft to "World Lease" at half-price, you can never purchase any used aircraft to bolster your fleet, and all aircraft are sold at a fixed price which never moves even as the design ages.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules / Not Playing Fair With Resources: If your airline runs in the red for a year, it goes bankrupt and you lose. If an AI airline runs in the red for a year, it goes bankrupt, changes its name and gets a huge influx of cash to start over and bounce back. Averted in Supersonic where the AI is subject to the same "Bankruptcy and elimination upon one year of red" rule that players are; once an AI is eliminated, it's gone for good.
• No Bulk Discounts: Aircraft prices are not eased by purchasing in large quantities. However, manufacturers will sometimes offer their planes at half-price for one turn. One cannot imagine how much money Boeing loses when you buy ten enormous 747-400s at half price and never purchase another one again.
  • Slightly averted in Supersonic: If more than half of your fleet is composed of Boeing Aircraft, you will get a 10% discount on future Boeing purchases. If the fleet composition falls below half, the discount is lost. International Relations can also affect the price of aircraft. (Example: If the attitude between your home country and the US is rated green (positive), you can purchase American aircraft at a 10% lower cost.)
• No Plot? No Problem!: Justified. The goal is simply to start and expand an international airline.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: The Supersonic Era from the 1994-released Aerobiz Supersonic has the player starting in 2000.
• We Buy Anything: The "World Lease" corporation will purchase any aircraft and at any quantity from you. Got a '40s era, piston-powered Lockheed L1049 to sell in 1974? We'll buy it for half the price you purchased it!
• Zeerust: Futuristic predictions of huge, 1000-passenger airliners & supersonic airliners traversing the globe seem almost quaint for someone who picks up the game now.