- One of first games I ever played at my dad's work when I was probably 6 or 7 years old. I've always enjoyed flight Sims, understanding this dubiously qualifies :). I've enjoyed the strategic aspect of fuel and bomb management and while the ai is simple, it provided a challenge.
I now have kids of my own; over the winter I setup an old laptop with old games, and started introducing them chronologically to games like Sopwith, Paratrooper, Alley Cat etc.
My 6 year olds son comment on this game in his journal:
"I like: everything. I don't like: nothing."
Took me a second to not over interpret the seeming double negative :-)
Update : years later I played wings of fury on my cousin's amiga 500 ; far better game but not the same magic :)
- The first time I ever saw a PC it was running Sopwith. Must have been 1989. I loved the game, but it was this exotic new machine that really interested me. It had 5.25” floppies, probably a 286 and quite an old machine by then.
I had only used Z80/128k machines up to then. My dad had an Amstrad 6128, with those 3” “hard” floppies, sturdy, with a decent thick metal gate.
This PC was a very different beast. I remember being confused about the disks. They seemed weak and unprotected ! you could literally see that delicate magnetic surface through the opening. I had always been told never to touch it, but there it was, just asking to be touched…
- I loved Sopwith as a child and back in 2004 I made my own version 'Camel' as a homage to Sopwith https://sopwithcamel.sourceforge.net/ to get myself a job in the games industry. Hard to compete with the original though. :)
- The classic Sopwith clone from the golden days of the Finnish shareware game scene, Triplane Turmoil, turns thirty this year. It was open sourced in 2009 and community-ported to more modern platforms via SDL. Was a lot of fun back in the days of shared-keyboard multiplayer.
- I got sopwith.exe from my uncle's "big blue disks" subscription. plus a lot of other racy games an 8 year old shouldn't have played.
I tried playing a copy on a modern computer and the game started and finished on its own in about 1/4 of a second! i'm not that fast anymore!
I got very good at dropping the bomb while upside down and then flipping and getting outta there. i was also obsessed with disney's tale spin and imagined it was the seaduck.
- I remember playing this on my families Olivetti M24. It was very difficult. Maybe because the game was speed sensitive and the M24 was an 8086 running 8Mhz. Good times nonetheless.
- Like many others here I played this a lot when young on my dad’s PC. I remember finding it really hard to play at the time!
- Great game. I was hoping for a webgl/wasm version but oh well.
- I played this on the original IBM PC. (Un)fortunately, my dad got the 8MHz upgrade, so the game was really hard, because it was built for a 4MHz clock.
Luckily someone eventually realeased a DOS utility that would fake a 4MHz clock by making everything take two cycles.
Good times. :)
- Was the utility called slomo? I recall having to do something like `slomo sopwith.exe` to bring the processing loop back down into human ranges of reaction times.
- I think ours had a turbo button that would double/half the clock speed. Good times indeed :)
- I seem to recall that the turbo button didn't come along until the 80286, but some of the PC clones had them before that.
My 486 definitely had a turbo button (that was the one I built after using the original PC for so many years).
- AFAIK no first-party IBM PC ever had a turbo button, only clones, and my only personal recollection of pre-286 clones running significantly faster than 4.77 MHz were the Compaq Deskpro and AT&T PC 6300.
I don't know about the PC 6300 — I only ever used it to run Aldus PageMaker, which, running under Windows on an 8086, could use all the speed it could get — but the Deskpro had a keystroke combination to switch between native and compatible speeds rather than a button.
- The Turbo button worked wonders for Tetris. You start it with turbo turned on, so Tetris adjusts to the computer’s speed - but it only does this once, at startup. As soon as the blocks start falling, you turn the turbo off, and now your Tetris runs at half speed. I even managed, a few times, to roll over a score of 32,768 (ah, those signed integers).
- Hmm, maybe my memory is betraying me. I remember our first family computer was an XT and then later we had a 386. Maybe I'm misremembering and it was the 386 that had the turbo button or maybe the earlier one was a clone. My first own PC was a 486 as well that I built together with my dad. Good memories.
- One of the PC games that worked great on the sorta-PC 186 RM Nimbus which a lot of British schools had in the 80s and 90s.
- Reminds me of Defender, a faster version with a 'Smart Bomb!' that was so fun to use :)
- I've spent endless hours playing Sopwith! What a legend!
- Discovered this on an old Apple 2 in the 90s. Loved the basic physics of things like flying inverted or flying down low and then releasing a bomb while pulling up into a steep climb so the bomb would fly more laterally to a target.
- I was just thinking of this game last night. I was wondering if AI could take the ASM and convert it into a browser game. Playable w/o DOSBOX.
- I fondly remember what essentially is a more modern clone of Sopwith - "Pe-2 diving bomber"
It is fun. Shoot-bomb-rearm/refuel in missions, upgrade your plane in between
- This is the first computer game I remember playing on my brother's Commodore Colt. I was very bad at it.
- More info on the SDL Sopwith port project https://fragglet.github.io/sdl-sopwith/
- That's an outstanding port! Kudos!
- Did the site get slashdotted?
- This game was so fun. I think there's a lot of unexplored game design in this style of 2d aviation.
The multiplayer game Altitude was a good modern example.
- We had an awesome split screen dogfighting game on a Win98 PC where everyone had a Spitfire-like plane and tried to take the others down. You could land at your base and heal etc. Super fun. I think it was called Iron Birds? Don't think I've found it since.
- Lufteauser is a bigger space & higher motion, but has hit some good vibes for me, in this zone. Single player.
We were always begging the daycare to let us play this. Very solid.
- Do you mean Luftrausers?
- Yes sorry thank you!
- Highfleet is nice.
- As a small kid, I learned how to use the DOS command line to launch this game on my parents' PC. I also remember really enjoying Sopwith 2, which added cows, among other things.
- What a memory. I loved game.
- I remember playing this game on my dad's computer, and being largely baffled at what I was supposed to do. Shoot, drop bombs, of course - but how do I land, refuel, how do the points work?
Still a core memory, though.
- Superior successor was Wings of Fury. The DOS version.
Honorable mention: Choplifter. Gameboy.
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