Sopwith (The Author's Edition)

About the game

Sopwith is one of the oldest action games on the PC, and still one of the most recognisable: a small biplane seen from the side, a strip of rolling hills drawn in a single line, and the four colours of a CGA card. It was written in 1984 by David L. Clark at BMB Compuscience in Canada, originally as a demonstration for the company's networking hardware, and spread from there to almost every office PC of the decade.

The plane starts on its runway. You open the throttle, roll down the strip and lift off, and from then on the game is about controlling something that wants to fall. The biplane turns in steps, stalls if you climb too steeply or fly too slowly, and has only so much fuel, so many bombs and so many bullets. Your job is to cross the landscape and destroy the enemy's buildings, then come back, land on your own runway to refuel and rearm, and go out again.

What people remember most is the small stuff around the war. Flocks of birds scatter when you fly into them. Oxen graze in the fields, and shooting one costs you points. A plane that runs out of fuel or speed spins down to the ground, and a crash is followed by the next plane waiting on the runway, until all of your lives are gone.

This is The Author's Edition, the version Clark kept updating himself, in the build of February 2003, the first he released as free software.

Playing it here

Click Play. After the title screen the game asks two questions: press S for a single player game (ground targets only) or C to also face enemy planes flown by the computer, and then N for novice or E for expert. Novice is the place to start: bullets and bombs are unlimited and the plane does not stall.

Hold X until the plane reaches flying speed, then press comma to pull up off the runway.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Speed keeps you in the air. Below a minimum speed the plane stalls and drops its nose. On expert, keep the throttle up when climbing.

Land to refuel. The gauges at the bottom show what you have left. Flying slowly and level over your own runway brings the plane down, and while it sits there it is refuelled and rearmed.

H is a rescue button. If you are lost or running low, H turns the plane around and heads for home.

Leave the oxen alone. They are not targets, and hitting one takes points away instead of adding them.

Credits and licence

Sopwith was designed and programmed by David L. Clark. In 2003 he released it under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later, and this page runs his own build of The Author's Edition, unmodified. He asks that nobody give that subtitle to their own derivative versions, and that no derivative bring the game into disrepute. The licence requires the source code to be available with the game, so the source package he published is hosted here and linked below, together with the licence text.