[mewse]

From the description, I'm guessing that the game your father played was "Firefox", a 1983 laser disc game by Atari.

The game synced dynamic computer graphics on top of pre-recorded laser disc background video. The "somehow switch to footage of the enemy aircraft crashing and burning" was, unsurprisingly, accomplished by simply jumping to a different track on the laserdisc, and typically happened when you completed one level and were about to begin the next.

I've never played it myself, but the gameplay actually looks surprisingly similar to Atari's vector graphic "Star Wars" game.

Or maybe not surprisingly once you notice that Firefox was created by the same team who had made that Star Wars arcade game the year before, and would go on to make the also-similar Empire Strikes Back arcade game the following year. I guess if you've got a winning formula, don't mess with it too much!

I remember once standing at a booth at the MacWorld Expo looking up at the massive display of a newly released game "Jump Raven" in which you were tasked with flying a hovercraft through city streets, shooting baddies, and all that usual video game stuff. I commented to the random guy standing next to me, "It looks a bit like Apache Strike, doesn't it?", referring to an old helicopter sim from like eight years earlier which had used a very similar viewpoint and game mechanics, albeit with only fairly primitive black and white graphics. And that random guy standing next to me turned and said, "I'm allowed to plagiarize from myself". Oops! (Sorry, Bill, I hadn't realised you were the programmer on Jump Raven too!) :D

[bitwize]

> From the description, I'm guessing that the game your father played was "Firefox", a 1983 laser disc game by Atari.

I'm older than you think (and so is my father). The arcade machine he played dates from the 1960s, and did not involve a computer.

[mewse]

Ah, cool, I wasn’t aware of arcade machines using recorded video before the brief laser disc era! If you have any references or links where I could read up about them, I’d be fascinated to learn more!