by NikolaNovak
0 subcomment
- 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…
- 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triplane_Turmoil
by abroun_beholder
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- 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. :)
- 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.
- 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. :)
by digitalsushi
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- 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.
by qingcharles
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- 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.
- 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!
- 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
by contingencies
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- Superior successor was Wings of Fury. The DOS version.
Honorable mention: Choplifter. Gameboy.
by stephenhuey
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- 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.
by NooneAtAll3
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- 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.
by ChrisArchitect
1 subcomments
- More info on the SDL Sopwith port project https://fragglet.github.io/sdl-sopwith/
by jesse_dot_id
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- 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!
by migueldeicaza
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- Did the site get slashdotted?
- Great game. I was hoping for a webgl/wasm version but oh well.
- 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.
by pavel_lishin
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- 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.
- What a memory. I loved game.
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