Sopwith – 1984 Game (2000)
sopwith.orgOne 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…
Oh but the 3" disks have the window with the gate on the INSIDE of the disk... While it's much harder to break it than on the 3.5", once it does... Big sad.
I remember these disk from my Spectrum +3 . Indeed more hard and resistant that the 3.5" . Sad, that the format was on the losing side and never evolved beyond the 128k (or was 256k?) that could store on a single side.
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 love this game so much - the theme music randomly pops into my head at least once a year :)
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. :)
More info on the SDL Sopwith port project https://fragglet.github.io/sdl-sopwith/
That's an outstanding port! Kudos!
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.
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.
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!
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.
Highfleet is nice.
I've spent endless hours playing Sopwith! What a legend!
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. :)
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
Probably thinking of “moslo”.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Superior successor was Wings of Fury. The DOS version.
Honorable mention: Choplifter. Gameboy.
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.
The first 2D flying game like this that I played was Fokker, on my friend's Atari ST, back in 1992 or so. Triplane Turmoil got played a LOT too, before I discovered Sopwith, the original :) Such a great control scheme!
I remember playing Dogfight on BBC Micro around 1982. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BB3HMX2xovk
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
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.
This is the first computer game I remember playing on my brother's Commodore Colt. I was very bad at it.
Reminds me of Defender, a faster version with a 'Smart Bomb!' that was so fun to use :)
Wow, I wanted to pick up again Nand2tetris this year, this fills that hole! Thanks!
Did the site get slashdotted?
Great game. I was hoping for a webgl/wasm version but oh well.
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.