40 Years of Sopwith

Playing Sopwith as a kid was great - and taught valuable life lessons.

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?"

Interview from one day ago with the original author of the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIoYM_p3HX4

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.

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.

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.. :)

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?

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).

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 remember dropping bombs to make gigantic holes and tunnels. Spending hours on that single only level. Cool game.

I loved this game as a kid. I spent hours playing it.

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.

The intro song is forever burned into my brain. The system buzzer was peak audio.

I made my own loose clone of this game in 2001, using DirectX. Lots of fun implemonting explosions and smoke trails and stuff.

Awesome! I remember this game from when I was a few years old. It somehow was called “camel”. I remember the language being french.

wow memories of playing this on a green screen TRS-80 maybe. Flashback!