Fun little review by Marcin Wichary of a 1984 flying video game called Sopwith, which was never supposed to be released to the public (an event that the game’s creator didn’t learn about until years later).
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This reminds me of Richthofen's Revenge, which was for the Commodore 64. My dad, a pilot and early video game enthusiast (he had an Odyssey 2000 from the '70s we used to play on when we were little) played that game over and over again. (That, and Centipede.)
I played that on my friend Tom’s C64! But we also bought a computer gaming magazine at the Osco Drug store(1983? 1984? 1985?), and it had pages and pages of code that we transcribed into his C64 to create a flying game and I honestly believe it was called Sopwith.
I remember keying in Richthofen's Revenge from the pages of Compute!'s Gazette. Not even a numeric keypad on my C64 to speed things up!
Yes! I typed that in from COMPUTE'S First Book of Commodore 64 Games back in the day. Didn't learn all that much about programming in the process, but felt a sense of accomplishment and enjoyed playing the game a bit.
My childhood just came rushing back to me.
Crazy how that screen image transported me back as well...
Sometime in the early 90s, my family got our first computer: an IBM 80386. My dad got it from a coworker, and the coworker provided a random set of floppy discs with various games and programs. one of which was Sopwith. We all had to learn how to insert the floppy disk, navigate to the A drive, and type the DOS command to launch the game. Such a simple concept for a game, and a lot of fun. Crazy that its creator didn’t know it had reached a wide audience.
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