EA 
PC (MS-DOS)

Demanding for its time (it refused to look good on anything less than a 33-MHz 386 machine), Michael Jordan in Flight is notable primarily because it’s one of the first 3D sports games, if one that didn’t quite have the licensing game down pat.

Players picked a 3-on-3 team of no-names from Jordan’s hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina, and pitted themselves against teams from other small towns. You could choose to play as Jordan, or switch teammates to always control the ball carrier, an approach that wasn’t nearly as fun, but made up for the game’s poor AI.

The canned character animations, digitised from live-action video, were startlingly good by 1992’s standards, following on from the heavily animated excesses of Konami’s Double Dribble. The court was the only three-dimensional thing about the game, and despite being situated in what looked like the middle of a black hole (no audience, team bench or referees to be seen), the sweeping camera angles and turned this by-the-book half-court game into quite a compelling little timewaster.

Fatigue played a large role in the game as well, with you having to keep an eye on each NPC player, and swap him out as he got more tired. Sound effects were crisp, and as well as playing basketball, MJ also made a few digitised cameo appearances when players either made a great play (giving the thumbs up or saying “Thanks for the Nike poster!”) or did something stupid like jumping for a rebound at the half-court line (hands on hips, shaking his head like a disappointed schoolmarm).

When the games were wrapped up, sportscaster Ron Barr offered a full statistical breakdown, and instant replays and highlight films were available for players wanting to relive (or show off) their glory. Extra visual glory, too, was available to players with state-of-the-art 66MHz PCs and SVGA cards, although they would have been few and far between when it was released. Sixteen scant years later, the game is now abandonware, and freely available for download to anyone capable of running a simple DOS window. How time flies.