Falcon 4.0

Development and post-release

Falcon 4.0 was first announced as being in development on September 1994. The game faced multiple development delays and revisions courtesy of the 3D cards revolution, corporate problems and Windows 95, so that it 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. After the acquisition of Microprose by Hasbro, the new management team set the deadline to December 1998. Gilman Louie and some other developers of Falcon 3.0 were hired to assist and the game was eventually released, riddled with bugs. Several patches were released, but on 7 December 1999 Hasbro laid off the Falcon 4.0 team.

In April 2000, the game's source code leaked to the public, and a project called EFalcon started. Another team, 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. Over the years, this leak made the community modification Falcon BMS possible.

In May 2001, G2 Interactive purchased the rights to develop a game in the Falcon series, though still under license from Infogrames (later Atari). They were developing an expanded release of the game, Falcon 4: Gold - Operation: Infinite Resolve, as well as Falcon 5.0. Operation: Infinite Resolve was originally scheduled for Q4 2003, input from Atari prevented the release as late as 7 January 2004. On 29 February 2004, G2 Interactive posted that there was a contract amendment proposal from Atari's side which they refused, and announced that they would no longer work on games in any Atari IP. On the same day, they announced Air Combat Command: Fighter Ops in association with GenAvSimulations, but the game would also not be released.

Graphsim Entertainment was the next in line to develop an enhanced version, Falcon 4.0: Allied Force, which was released in June 2005.

As part of Atari's bankruptcy sale in 2013, the franchise rights were transferred to Tommo via their Retroism label. On 4 May 2023, the resurrected MicroProse purchased the rights and announced that the community-made BMS mod would be officially supported, but did not specify in what way.

Leader's Edition

There was a Squadron Leader's Edition released at the same time. It uses a 3-ring loose-leaf cover instead of a box.

Awards

• Computer Gaming World
  • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) – #11 Top Vaporware Title in Computer Game History
• PC Player (Germany)
  • Issue 01/2000 - Best Flight Simulation in 1999
• PC Powerplay (Germany)
  • Issue 07/2006 - #4 Best Packaging (together with Falcon 3.0)
• Power Play
  • Issue 02/1999 – Best Flight Simulation in 1998

Information also contributed by Ashley Pomeroy, Toni Oinas and Zovni.