A-10 Attack! is a combat flight simulation video game for the Apple Macintosh computer released by Parsoft Interactive in 1995. The game features an A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft that takes part in a variety of missions in West Germany during a hypothetical limited conventional attack by the Warsaw Pact. A-10 boasted one of the most detailed flight models of any game of its era, a physics model that extended to solid-body interactions with the ground and complete aerodynamics for every object in the game, including ordnance. Macworld rated it "Best Flight Simulator" in a review of Mac simulations. The game was followed by a sequel named A-10 Cuba!, originally as a stand-alone game on the Mac and Windows-based PC's, but later re-released on the Mac as a plug-in module for the original game. The Mac OS versions were produced by Parsoft, while the PC version of Cuba was a joint production with Activision. This partnership was renewed for Parsoft's final release, Fighter Squadron: The Screamin' Demons Over Europe. History Development of what would evolve into A-10 Attack! started after the release of Hellcats: Missions at Leyte Gulf, an expansion pack for Hellcats Over the Pacific that was released in 1992. Although Hellcats managed to do a lot with limited capabilities of the hardware, the game had a number of obvious drawbacks. For one, the missions were written in computer code as part of the game engine, which meant the user could not add new missions or modify the existing ones. Another problem was that the vehicles and other objects in the game were hard-coded with various behaviors, which likewise made them difficult to customize. Even the game map itself existed only in the code. Parsoft started experimenting with a plug-in system to replace the hard-coded objects in Hellcats. Known as the Virtual Battlefield Environment (VBE), the system still required programming tools to build out the objects, but once they were completed they could be loaded into the game engine from individual files. Adding these into a game simply required the files to be placed in the appropriate directories in the user's file system. VBE allowed anything to be added in this fashion; aircraft, vehicles, missions, and maps. Another problem with Hellcats was its very basic physics, which simulated only the most basic flight dynamics and resulted in flight that was unrealistic in a number of ways. There were no structural