Trivia
In the German gaming magazine PC Player (issue 01/2000) Falcon 4.0 was named as "Best Flight Simulation in 1999".
The sequel, as mentioned below, is actually called Falcon 4.0: Allied Force, rather than Falcon 5.0; it was released in June 2005 and is a further refinement of Falcon 4.0's engine, which - as with Operation Flashpoint - was developed over a period of several years with an eye to further expansion down the line. Along with the Quake engine, which apparently still has some tendrils hidden away in Half-Life 2, this must make the Falcon 4.0 engine one of the longest-lived game engines of all time.
After numerous delays, and the acquisition of Microprose by Hasbro, the new management team set deadline to December 1998. Gilman Louie and some other developers of Falcon 3.0 was hired to assist and the game was eventually released with horrible bugs in the code.
Several patches were released but in 7th of December 1999, Hasbro laid off the Falcon team. The next major event for the community was in April 2000 when the Falcon source code leaked to the public. Project called EFalcon started. Another team called Ibeta was making realism patches for the game using hex editing. These two weren't compatible until they were combined in a project called SuperPAK:
http://f4ut.frugalsworld.com/index.shtml
In May 2001, G2 Interactive purchased rights for Falcon series and is currently developing Falcon 5.
Falcon 4.0 was first announced as being in development on September 1994 (eat that Daikatana). The game faced millions of development delays and revisions courtesy of the 3D cards revolution, corporate problems and Windows 95, so that the game never entered true beta stage until early 1998. The major delays for the game, however, came when Leon Rosenshein was brought in on late 1995 as lead designer. Leon, who had worked for the U.S. government, basically took the project back to the drawing board with lots of ambitious design decisions, effectively scrapping all the early works.
Contributed by
Zovni (9138) on Nov 20, 2001.
A diverse fandom has continued the task to improve the product now that Falcon 4 programming team has been disbanded. The most prominent of which is the eFalcon team
http://eteam.frugalsworld.com/index.shtml
There was a "Squadron Leader's Edition" released at the same time. It uses a 3-ring loose-leaf cover instead of a box.
