* The game was developed for the company that the author worked for in 1984 as a demonstration of the company's networking tech. It was supposed to only be for their clients. But it ended up being copied and passed around and by 1988 (at the latest) it was being distributed by shareware distributors.
* There is an Atari ST port that the author made around the same time as the PC version which apparently never made it onto the internet but might still be floating around somewhere (on disk or ROM cartridge) in his personal collection of stuff.
I loved this game as a kid - it gave you a rare sense of freedom - movement within an expansive space, and that joy of throwing things in gravity-defined arcs, rather than locking you into grids, straight lines, or constrained single-screen levels. Never knew there was a 'fly home' key though.
Chopper Commando was (for me) a spiritual followup, and I loved that game even more.
It flies about as well as the Outer Wilds autopilot (famous for crashing into the sun because the sun is often between you and where you're going), if there's a building between you and the airport, it's going to fly into the building. But I used to land this way all the time, it can do the hard bit if you have an otherwise reasonable path to landing.
We used to play this on the notionally IBM PC compatible machines on a Netware LAN in the "Computer Science" laboratory as opposed to the BBC Micros w/ Econet in the "Electronics" laboratory at school, or later the actual PC compatible (as in, running Windows) LAN Manager network in the library.
In the BBC lab we'd play a LAN MUD about a sort of grim future world that was built by pupils older than me (out of hours I'm told Elite was played but I never saw that), in the CS lab we'd play either a very violent fantasy RPG MUD also home grown, or Sopwith and in the Library games were banned but we had some weird stuff inspired by a mix of teletext and BBS that I built, and an IRC-type setup again built by me written in some mix of QuickBASIC and pre-standard C++.
As a kid I always wondered what BMB Compuscience was, and when they would come out with a second version. And how the multiplayer networking was supposed to be set up.
This was one of the most engaging games for me at the time, played on a friend's Tandy 1000 first, then on my generic IBM compatible PC.
I would buy the nostalgia t-shirt if it had the same imagery as the mouse pad.
Some 20 years younger, there is a 1990s DOS era game called Triplane Turmoil which is a similar dogfighting game with multiplayer and solo campaigns. It was a small time indie hit in Finland and Europe back in the day when games were distributed as floppy disks in the mail.
It is now open source, on Debian you can just apt-get install triplane .
This is one of the first games I ever played on a PC. The PC was a Robotron XT that smelled like electrical components, had a huge fan and the sound of the HD (a humongous 20Mb at the time) was akin to bending a plastic film back and forth. I was fascinated. Oh, and the obligatory green monochrome screen and XTree was part of the experience. I was only a child then but those memories are still well imprinted into my mind. I think that was the moment when I got hooked.
And XTree, does anyone remember that wonderful file manager? I think it's still superior to what is being offered in windows in 2024.
This was also the first game I played on my OWN computer, around the age of 6 or 7, an at that time already extremely outdated, Olivetti M24SP with amber screen, was a beautiful and VERY computery-computer.
Sopwith, AllyCat, 3Deamon, Digger and PCMan were the games I fondly remember from it. There were some floppy disks, but at the time I didn't know how to use them, and could only use the few things that were on the MFM harddrive.
Later I got a C64, which, gaming wise, was a huge upgrade, I bought it from a guy in my town who was saving for a Pentium.. :)
We got an Olivetti M24 in the home around 1986 (I was about 13 years old at that time). It had a CGA color monitor, 2x 5 1/4" floppy drives and no hard disk. It ran MS-DOS 3.3.
Sopwith along with Alleycat, Digger, Centipede, Winter/Summer Games, Lode Runner, Bruce Lee, were just some of the first games I played. But I looked with envy at my friends with C64's and one of them even got an Amiga 500 around 1987.
I learned programming with GW-BASIC on that M24 machine.
Oh, wow, CGA graphics... makes me glad I had an Amiga at that time!
Anyway, looks like a nice game regardless, if only I could play it with my German keyboard :( Ok, I could contort my fingers and memorize the controls (EDIT: I tried, but "/" is Shift+7 on a German keyboard, and even if I press that, it doesn't work), but what's wrong with also supporting the arrow keys? I mean, all PCs had those, right?
> what's wrong with also supporting the arrow keys? I mean, all PCs had those, right?
No, the arrow keys were introduced with the Model M keyboard in 1985. Before that only the numpad arrows were available and they were a bit awkward to use for gaming.
This game was released in 1984, so it makes sense that they weren't supported.
It did indeed, they were sufficient (barely) for moving the cursor, but there were only two, iirc, default was right and down, and to go left and up, you had to press them while holding shift
To be honest, it felt like a step backwards from the gameplay-similar 'Harrier Attack' on the ZX spectrum, though lets be honest, they're all essentially just 'scramble' clones (possibly with some extra inspiration from 'super cobra' which itself was a scramble clone).
That's brought back a load of memories! Harrier Attack was a brilliant game. I never played Sopwith, but I had a 1986 DOS clone of it called "Red Baron". For some reason, I hadn't made the link between the gameplay.
I remember playing this on my father's 8086 and later 286 machines as a kid. I believe this is the first time I've thought of or seen the game in over 30 years. Nice :)
I remember this - moving to a 386 computer was fun as the speed depended on the clock speed so playable on an AT but not on a 386.
This was at work and I don't think we played this on the network even though we played Novell games - involving a maze to test the network - which was needed as cabling was temperamental.
I guess the plane is a Sopwith Camel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_Camel)? Maybe they were forced to rename the game after a well-known cigarette brand came knocking?
To this day, before I open my mouth to say something hard, I stop and think: "before I drop this bomb, am I flying straight - or upside down?"
Interesting takeaways:
* The game was developed for the company that the author worked for in 1984 as a demonstration of the company's networking tech. It was supposed to only be for their clients. But it ended up being copied and passed around and by 1988 (at the latest) it was being distributed by shareware distributors.
* There is an Atari ST port that the author made around the same time as the PC version which apparently never made it onto the internet but might still be floating around somewhere (on disk or ROM cartridge) in his personal collection of stuff.
Chopper Commando was (for me) a spiritual followup, and I loved that game even more.
https://youtu.be/gXdfsFYX-XU the version with MT-32 music, which is I never ever heard till today.
They're probably both ripping off the same concept art of the YF-22/YF-23 (I suspect it's closer to the YF-23), but still.
We used to play this on the notionally IBM PC compatible machines on a Netware LAN in the "Computer Science" laboratory as opposed to the BBC Micros w/ Econet in the "Electronics" laboratory at school, or later the actual PC compatible (as in, running Windows) LAN Manager network in the library.
In the BBC lab we'd play a LAN MUD about a sort of grim future world that was built by pupils older than me (out of hours I'm told Elite was played but I never saw that), in the CS lab we'd play either a very violent fantasy RPG MUD also home grown, or Sopwith and in the Library games were banned but we had some weird stuff inspired by a mix of teletext and BBS that I built, and an IRC-type setup again built by me written in some mix of QuickBASIC and pre-standard C++.
This was one of the most engaging games for me at the time, played on a friend's Tandy 1000 first, then on my generic IBM compatible PC.
I would buy the nostalgia t-shirt if it had the same imagery as the mouse pad.
Wonder if any of the ports have implemented it in terms of modern networking.
It is now open source, on Debian you can just apt-get install triplane .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altitude_(video_game)
And XTree, does anyone remember that wonderful file manager? I think it's still superior to what is being offered in windows in 2024.
Sopwith, AllyCat, 3Deamon, Digger and PCMan were the games I fondly remember from it. There were some floppy disks, but at the time I didn't know how to use them, and could only use the few things that were on the MFM harddrive.
Later I got a C64, which, gaming wise, was a huge upgrade, I bought it from a guy in my town who was saving for a Pentium.. :)
Sopwith along with Alleycat, Digger, Centipede, Winter/Summer Games, Lode Runner, Bruce Lee, were just some of the first games I played. But I looked with envy at my friends with C64's and one of them even got an Amiga 500 around 1987.
I learned programming with GW-BASIC on that M24 machine.
[1] https://github.com/sobomax/digger
Anyway, looks like a nice game regardless, if only I could play it with my German keyboard :( Ok, I could contort my fingers and memorize the controls (EDIT: I tried, but "/" is Shift+7 on a German keyboard, and even if I press that, it doesn't work), but what's wrong with also supporting the arrow keys? I mean, all PCs had those, right?
No, the arrow keys were introduced with the Model M keyboard in 1985. Before that only the numpad arrows were available and they were a bit awkward to use for gaming.
This game was released in 1984, so it makes sense that they weren't supported.
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/9199/why-... has a few more examples of this kind of old-school variety of arrow keys.
This was at work and I don't think we played this on the network even though we played Novell games - involving a maze to test the network - which was needed as cabling was temperamental.
I managed to get multiplayer to work, I think over parallel ports, it was super laggy but still fun very.
I wrote a sprite editor for Sopwith. It used the same (or very similar) sprite encoding as NES roms.
There are also level editor apps out there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_Camel