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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…
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.
The 5.25" disks really were fragile. I remember holding one up to light and seeing the actual magnetic surface through the sleeve. Amstrad's 3" felt like a finished product; those floppy squares felt like you were handling the disk naked.
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.
Shared-keyboard multiplayer is such an underrated mechanic — we used to do this with a single keyboard for DOS games and the chaos of accidental inputs half the time made it funnier than any online mode.
That's the thing about good game music -- it gets lodged somewhere in long-term memory and just lives there. Still happens to me with the Doom E1M1 riff.
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. :)
Outstanding seems strong. The controls feel noticeably smoother than the original, which strips out a lot of the frustration that made landing and dogfighting actually satisfying. Easier isn't always better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 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?
If you want the original multiplayer, DOSBox has IPX tunneling built in. We set this up once -- one machine runs ipxnet startserver, others do ipxnet connect [ip]. Gets you the real DOS version running over the internet fine.
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 :)