Bill Stealey
Retired United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and video game designer
John Wilbur Stealey Sr., better known as Bill Stealey, is an American game developer and publisher, and a former military pilot. Stealey founded MicroProse with Sid Meier in 1982 and released many flight simulators with the company. He was known for his appearances in military uniform and aerial stunts aboard the company's real plane while promoting the games. After a brief retirement in the early 1990s, he founded iEntertainment Network in 1995 and is the current CEO. In 2018 he also re-acquired MicroProse assets and revived the studio with David Lagettie. Stealey acts largely in a consultancy capacity at the revived studio.
Career
US Air Force and consultancy
Stealey had the goal of becoming a fighter pilot and eventually a general. He attended Pennsylvania Military College in the 1960s; he wore glasses but "fought his way into the program" regardless, and was granted a waiver. This allowed him to attend the United States Air Force Academy in 1966, but unfortunately a "minor slip-up in his final days dropped him to sixth in his class and out of the running for the fighter assignments." He was however asked to work as a flight instructor after his graduation in 1970, flying the T-37. Stealey has stated that he was advocating for computer based flight simulators in military training as early as 1971, but faced opposition due to fears of new pilots losing flight hours. He attained the rank of Captain before leaving active service and going back into education, while continuing to serve with the Pennsylvania Air National Guard over the following decade.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Bill Stealey” as retired United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and video game designer. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q328462. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1982, 1995, 2018 and 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bill Stealey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.