The action is simulated. The excitement is real.

It started in a Las Vegas arcade. In May 1982, two co-workers from a Maryland electronics firm stopped at a Red Baron machine. Bill, a former Air Force pilot, set a score. Sid, a systems engineer, doubled it. The enemy pilots were predictable, Sid said. “I could write a better game in a week.” Bill replied: “If you could, I could sell it.”

Sid wrote Hellcat Ace in three months. Bill sold it around Baltimore's computer shops with a hard sell and plenty of Air Force bravado. When a shop said no, Bill rang back later pretending to be an angry customer who couldn't find Hellcat Ace anywhere. Then he rang again as himself to take the order. A local kid copied the disks for 25 cents each.

Solo Flight followed in 1983: a flight sim with no guns at all. It sold steadily for years and proved the basement company could last. A rival publisher, HESWare, offered $250,000 to buy Solo Flight outright. Sid's advice: “I heard you shouldn't sell the family jewels.” Bill said no. The first big hit was just around the corner.

F-15 Strike Eagle was the breakthrough. It passed a million copies by 1989 and kept flying on new computers for a decade. Silent Service took players under the Pacific in a WWII submarine, and for a while outsold it. Then Gunship put you in an Apache helicopter and gave you a whole career: promotions, medals, capture, and, if it went wrong, permanent death. No game had done that before. Bill pulled the first version off the schedule when Sid showed him a better 3D engine, even though the adverts were already running. It shipped a year late and became a hit. Today a copy of Gunship is held in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

Sid wanted to make a pirate game. Bill's first reaction: “Pirates? Wait a minute, there are no airplanes in pirates.” At a dinner, the actor Robin Williams told Bill to put Sid's name on the box and promote him as the star. Pirates! was the first game to carry Sid's name. It came with an 80-page manual, mostly on Caribbean history. The next year, F-19 Stealth Fighter reached the shelves on the same day the US Air Force revealed its real stealth jet. It sold 100,000 copies in 60 days and went on show at the National Air and Space Museum. By then Bill was flying journalists upside down in the company's own plane, a T-28 called “Miss MicroProse”.

In 1989 Sid stood up at a developers' conference and said: “A game is a series of interesting decisions.” The next two years proved it. Frequent research trips to Baltimore’s railway museum helped shape Railroad Tycoon. It was the first “Tycoon” game of its kind, with a 180-page manual. Then came Civilization, built on $170,000. Every evening for a year, Sid left a new version on designer Bruce Shelley's chair. Bruce would play it each morning and reported back to Sid. “It was like going to game design university.” In 1996 Computer Gaming World named Civilization the best game of all time.

In late 1986 MicroProse opened its first British office in Tetbury, a small Cotswold market town in England. By 1988 the UK team said it handled 40% of MicroProse's business worldwide.

The Gloucestershire team found its own legends. Geoff Crammond, a physicist working alone, built Formula One Grand Prix: “realistic but also drivable”. A young Scottish programmer called Chris Sawyer learned his trade porting games for the office, then made Transport Tycoon as a tribute to Railroad Tycoon.

And then there was X-COM. In 1993 the new owners reviewed the line-up and said of a strange alien-invasion game from two brothers in Essex: “It's not what we want. Get rid of it.” The British branch managers quietly kept it going. Months later, when head office needed a hit the British office revealed X-COM wasn’t dead and was only 3 months from completion.  It sold over 600,000 copies and was Game of the Year.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the flight sims kept climbing. European Air War swept Simulation of the Year in 1998. The same year Falcon 4.0 arrived: a combat flight sim so deep that its players are still flying and improving it decades later.

In 2002, Grand Prix 4 was the last game to carry the original MicroProse name for nearly two decades. MicroProse changed hands as the games industry consolidated, and the studios behind its original catalogue gradually closed.

In 2019, the red logo was revived by current CEO David Lagettie, whose background in simulation gave him a special connection to MicroProse’s legacy. Enlisting the help of original co-founder Bill Stealey, he set out to publish the kind of games MicroProse was famous for. We are bringing classics home and giving them new life, alongside launching new titles from small, specialist studios who share our passion for strategy, simulation, command, risk, and reward. The history on this page is our starting point. What comes next will be defined by the games we publish and the people who play them.