Strange but not true? Did a US game publisher really get raided by US intelligence services over a fighter plane that never existed?

Would you rather a story be exciting or true? Assume the story you’re hearing is not current and the validity of it does not matter for any reason other than satisfying your curiosity. It is, for all intents and purposes, a harmless tale. It’s not a stretch, I don’t think, to say we enjoy seeing the reaction on people’s faces when we surprise them with a good story, or when we make them laugh, or when we shock them, just as we like being surprised and amused and shocked by someone else’s story in return. Does it matter, then, whether a story is entirely, 100 percent true?

Have a look at this. It was a comment made on Eurogamer about MicroProse aerial combat sim F-19 Stealth Fighter. “They took a bunch of rumours about – and sightings of – a supposed US stealth fighter (the F-117 was not announced or confirmed at the time) and extrapolated backwards to figure out how it would work. They got so much right that their offices got raided by US intelligence services, who were convinced they must have had inside intel.” Offices raided by US intelligence services? It set my internal storytelling radar off.

I was six years old when the F-19 Stealth Fighter game came out in 1988, so it’s no surprise I hadn’t heard the story before, but here and now I was captivated both by the drama of it and by how it had been remembered for so long. I followed it up with the commenter who’d told it, the ever knowledgeable Rogueywon, but they had no more information to share. All we had was a half-remembered story. The question was: could it be true? I had to find out.

Immediately, though, I ran into a problem. F-19 Stealth Fighter, an aerial combat simulation about stealthily bombing targets before trying to get away in one piece, is 37 years old this year, meaning the people who worked on it – adults at the time – did so a long time ago, and are either not working in games any more, hard to find, or, in some cases, not around any more at all. MicroProse even blinked briefly out of existence in the late 90s, and while it eventually returned some years later, it’s no longer the company we remember – the company that originated legendary gaming series like Civilization and X-Com.