I did it! (Revisiting a childhood favorite game)

When I was 12 years old, one of the most impressive simulation games ever to come out for the Commodore 64 was released: MicroProse's Gunship. I spent months and months and hundreds of hours flying missions in it, trying to get the game's highest award: the Congressional Medal of Honor. [Yes, I know it's actually just "Medal of Honor". The game refers to it as the Congressional Medal of Honor, so that's how I refer to it in this post.]

Winning the ultimate medal was actually secondary to just flying it and having fun flying. It was one of the hardest games ever on the Commodore because it wasn't a shoot 'em up; it was an actual simulation. It strove to pack as much realism as possible into a platform that had a 1 MHz processor (approximately 4000 times slower in raw clock speed than just one core of a 4 GHz 8-core processor) and 64 kilobytes (not megabytes, not gigabytes, kilobytes) of RAM, and it wasn't afraid to be complex and intimidating to learn. The graphics were very, very good for the time (1986), but nowadays the closest competition is Minecraft.

All those hours playing Gunship turned out to have a major impact on me learning to fly; not just in kindling my interest in it but in invisibly burning piloting concepts into my head without me realizing it. It simulated things like ground effect, translating vertical components of lift into horizontal ones in a bank (meaning if you wanted to lose altitude quickly, you could go into a tight turn), trading altitude for airspeed, and so on.

I came across a copy of it the other day and figured I'd spend a half hour or so revisiting it just to see if I could remember how to play. At first it was a little rough just remembering all the keys for the controls, but not long in, it came back to me. Although I hadn't played this game in over 30 years, once I got the hang of the controls again, I was actually better at it now than I was then!

In large part, that is because I have 6000 hours of flight time behind me now, whereas I hadn't even been in a small plane then. That actually helped a lot because my instrument scan is automatic now. It takes so little of my cognitive resources to keep track of what the aircraft is doing now that I was able to devote much more of my mental effort to devising strategies, carrying out assault tactics, and performing evasive maneuvers when those didn't work.

Way back when, I struggled like hell to get that Medal of Honor. Very few who played it managed to do it, but after hundreds of hours, finally, FINALLY, I managed to become one of the few who did. Of course, not knowing the criteria for receiving it made it even harder to get; I just took the approach of shooting everything that moved and never returning to base with ammo left over.

(Remember, this was long before the web had a hundred walkthroughs for every game, YouTube had a thousand playthroughs, and there was no Google to get you through the hard parts. Most games didn't even have paper strategy guides—and there was no GameStop or Amazon to buy one from even if there was one. It turns out that there actually was a book written about Gunship... which I found out 34 years later when researching Gunship medal criteria!)

As it turns out, that approach is pretty close to what it takes to get the CMOH anyway, but Richard Sheffield's Gunship Academy lays out the criteria:

The question most frequently asked of the game designers at MicroProse is "What the heck do I have to do to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor?" Well, it's really quite simple. All you have to do is

• Score 5000 points
• Complete both missions
• Shoot down at least two Hinds
• Get wounded
• Live and don't get captured
• And do all that in less than 22.5 minutes

What I had intended to be only a quick stroll down memory lane turned into me playing several missions in a row. After a few hours, I managed to do something that took me hundreds of hours back then: I actually won the Congressional Medal of Honor again!

The mission that won me my second Congressional Medal of Honor in Gunship, only 33 years or so after the first one.

The coveted medal in all its 8-bit glory.

Probably one of the reasons I had a hard time getting the medal back then was because I tried to avoid getting into dogfights with the enemy helicopters (the Russian Mi-24 Hind-D) because their cannon could tear you to pieces quickly and ruin the whole mission. If I encountered one after completing both objectives, I'd run back to base as fast as possible instead of engaging it. I didn't know that bagging a second one was a requirement because, well, no one knew that, least of all me.

One of the things the list above leaves out is that you have to have won a campaign ribbon from all four theaters first. There is some debate over whether you have to win all the lower medals first. All I can say is that I had a mission where I fulfilled all the criteria and I had all the medals, but I didn't have all the ribbons. (I skipped straight to the fourth theater because the first three were too easy.) I was not awarded the CMOH for that mission, but when I did receive it, it was for a mission with a lower score after I went back and picked up the first three campaign ribbons. You can see what I'm talking about below, where I didn't have the CMOH at 5460 points but did get it at 5190 later:

That's a full salad bar in Gunship.

That's a nice way to start a new year, and unlike Forrest Gump, I didn't have to get shot in the buttocks!



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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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