Chopper Commando is a mission-based DOS game that was created by Mark Currie and released – depending on your source – in 1988, 1989 or 1990. (Rather than start each one of these articles musing about how there is very little consistency in the Official Release Date of games, please take it on faith that if I write down a year for a game’s release and you know it to be different – I saw my source somewhere. I promise!)
In Chopper Commando, you are a helicopter pilot working for one side of a conflict. The US? The good guys? I don’t think that the game specifically says. After creating a pilot and naming them – which effectively works as a save slot – you can choose what kind of mission you want and how difficult you want it to be. And then you are off.
You control your little helicopter using the keyboard, though it does have mouse support and I played it with a mouse when I had it new in 1990 or so. The keyboard controls and minimal system requirements means that it played perfectly on my PCjr. You may have a mission like being asked to destroy a tank four miles (or four screens) away. The game world has a friendly base on each side, so you may need to deliver information to the other one, surviving all the enemy tanks and surface to air missile towers along the way. You don’t know what mission you will get when you begin play.
And that is the wonder of this game.
Sure, it was 1988/1989/1990, but I want to talk about wonder for a moment. Pac-Man, to pick a game at random, is one of the greatest games to ever exist. When you start the game you are looking at the only maze the game has. The wonder isn’t coming from new mazes and boards at that point. It’s coming from cut-scenes (of which there are very few) and the new fruit. It’s coming from how to manipulate and interact with the ghosts. But, for as much as I love the game, a lot of what the game “is”, is present immediately.
Not the case with Chopper Commando. Each mission take perhaps a couple of minutes or less to experience, but it packs in variations in the design. There was no set way that you were forced to solve a mission. It’s a small world, but an open one. I would take turns playing this with my little brother, each of us using up the save slots for our pilots. This was a free game that I presume we got from bulletin boards and it was as engrossing as any commercial release.
There were stats! My brother and I loved stats. We learned Lotus 1-2-3 so we could enter statistics when we were playing Bases Loaded for the NES. And this game just served them up after each mission.
This was one of my first experiences with permadeath. I remember being horrified once, playing Wizardry, when I had a team kill and I believe I would have just rebooted the computer at that age – although I think Wizardry would have marked the characters as “out”, which was as good as dead? I am a proponent of being able to save a video game anywhere, except for arcade style games or when the game is built around not saving and implemented competently. That is the case here. It was made with permadeath in mind. You do have options if your helicopter is shot and placed into poor condition – you can eject, and at this point you are a little stick figure dude running around the game. If your landing gear is up, you’ll auto eject and your side of the conflict will eventually send another helicopter for you. But you have full motion as a little guy. You might fall down the very steep mountains on some boards, but you might be able to make it back to base…
There is also a good sense of humor in the game. After each mission, alive or dead, you get some commentary from the General and an unnamed military colleague.
Replaying it, while I had remembered a lot of its tricks, it is still comfort gaming. The world I grew up in – suburbs, home computer, nuclear family – it was comforting. It was written in Pascal and I think that Mark Currie was 15 when he created it.
Currie went on to make the excellent real-time strategy game called Trash, that possibly will be featured in this series in the future.
Lastly, there is an approved remake that I will play when I have a chance to compile it.
Chopper Commando was played on an IBM PCjr, with another round of play via eXoDOS.