Air Traffic Control

Air Traffic Control was one of those simple Flash games you'd find buried in a browser tab during the late 2000s. It didn't have fancy graphics or a story. You just had a radar screen and some blinking dots. The goal was straightforward: get the planes down safely without letting them crash into each other. It was the kind of game you played to pass ten minutes, but it could easily trap you for an hour.

You control everything from a top-down view. Each plane is a colored blip with a flight number, moving along a set path. Your job is to click a plane and assign it a runway. You have to manage their altitudes and speeds, sequencing their approaches so they don't collide. The planes keep coming, and the pace picks up steadily. It starts calmly, but soon you're juggling half a dozen aircraft, your eyes darting between descent paths and fuel warnings. The game feels like a quiet, focused kind of panic, where a single misclick can cause a chain reaction of disasters.