Choplifter | Code Like It's 198x

Most shooting games of 1982 counted what the player destroyed. Choplifter counted who the player saved. The player flies a helicopter across a border into enemy country, lands beside a burning barracks, waits while tiny figures run to it and climb in, and then flies them home under fire from tanks and jets. The score at the end is the number of people brought back alive, out of 64. It was the first game of Dan Gorlin, a trained pianist who wrote it in six months on a borrowed Apple II. Brøderbund published it in May 1982, and within a year it had been converted to other computers and was being linked, by nearly everyone except its author, to the Iran hostage crisis.

Fast facts

Author: Dan Gorlin, who designed and programmed it alone.
Publisher: Brøderbund; released for the Apple II in May 1982, at $34.95 on disk.
Controls: a joystick with two buttons on the Apple II, one to fire and one to turn the helicopter.
Goal: rescue 64 hostages, 16 to a barracks and at most 16 to a trip.
Enemies: the Bungeling Empire’s tanks, jet fighters and drone air mines.
Arcade: a new version by Sega in 1985.
Award: a Certificate of Merit in Electronic Games’ Arkie Awards for 1983, in the category of best computer audio/visual effects.

Six months on a borrowed Apple II

Gorlin had studied piano “at four colleges for seven or eight years”, he told Computer Games in 1984, and took a couple of computer courses along the way. Through one of his professors he got a job at the Rand Corporation, starting in support services and working his way up until he was programming alongside people with doctorates; Edge describes his work there as writing artificial-intelligence languages. In December 1981, with a house in Los Angeles to sell and time on his hands, he borrowed his grandfather’s Apple II. “Choplifter took six months,” he said, and it came out in May 1982. He was 28.

He began with the helicopter itself. “I was playing with a helicopter, trying to get the feel right, because helicopters always fascinated me,” he told Retro Gamer in 2008. He first tried to make it 3D, then settled for a side-scrolling game. The idea of rescuing people came from a teenager who was fixing his car. “He was a big Defender freak,” Gorlin told Edge. “One day he said: ‘You should have some men to pick up.’” Gorlin went to look at a Defender cabinet in a local laundrette, and only then realised the little figures in it were meant to be men.

The whole game was written in 6502 assembly language, with the graphics drawn on graph paper and typed in as hexadecimal. Gorlin said his hardest technical problem was speed: “squeezing that kind of speed and fluidity of motion out of a 1 MHz 6502”. He gave the helicopter momentum, which was unusual at the time, though he pointed out that the physics “aren’t even close to a simulation”. He also refused to write a keyboard version. “I loved having a linear joystick,” he told Retro Gamer, and he remembered joystick makers buying him drinks at trade shows because the game had sold so many of them.

Brøderbund’s co-founder Gary Carlston told Retro Gamer that Gorlin had first mentioned the game in a Los Angeles computer shop, whose staff suggested he ring the Carlstons. Gorlin told Edge that he chose a publisher by the look of its packaging, after Atari had turned him down, and that Brøderbund flew him out to meet them. Carlston asked for one change: “Originally the helicopters were too hard to fly, so I asked Dan to make it a little less realistic and therefore a little easier. But I knew it was a hit the moment I saw it.”

Playing it

The rescued hostages are delivered to a US Postal Service distribution centre, into which, Computer Gaming World explained, the helicopter had been smuggled disguised as a mail-sorting machine. Across the border stand four barracks, each holding 16 hostages. The player shoots a barracks open, lands, and waits while the hostages run to the helicopter. They wave as it flies overhead, and when set down at base they wave goodbye as it leaves on the next trip, which made Computer Gaming World’s reviewer “burst out laughing”. The helicopter can face left or right, or turn to face the screen and fire at targets in front of it.

On the first trip there are only tanks, which fire at the helicopter when it is on the ground. From the second trip, jet fighters arrive, and after them drone air mines that chase the helicopter. A jet’s bombing run on a landed helicopter would often miss the machine and kill a hostage instead, and a careless landing could crush the hostages it had come for. The review’s worst moment was losing a full load of 16 “in a firey crash on the way back to base”. Gorlin’s own advice, in 1984, was to leave the tanks alone where possible, since destroying them brought another wave, and to keep the barracks closed until ready to pick up.

There were no points for destroying anything. “I don’t like the idea of ‘scores’ when it seems like you’re trying to tell a story,” Gorlin told Retro Gamer, and “the number of planes and tanks you blew up seemed irrelevant to me”. The screen showed three counts instead: hostages killed, hostages aboard, and hostages safe. “Getting all 64 home safely is a task that few gamers are likely to ever accomplish,” Computer Gaming World warned.

Hostages in 1982

The Iranian hostage crisis had ended on 20 January 1981, after 444 days; the year before, a military rescue attempt with helicopters had ended in disaster in the Iranian desert. Reviewers made the connection at once. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer found even the burning helicopter “realistic enough to remind one of the U.S. fiasco in the Iranian desert”. Computer and Video Games wrote in January 1983 that the game “has obvious associations with the Iranian hostage affair”, though “no mention is made of the affair of course in the interest of good taste”. Gary Carlston later described Gorlin as inspired by the crisis.

Gorlin has consistently said it was not a direct model. He told Edge it was a “combination of pure luck and subliminal influences on thoughts at the time”, and that he had deliberately chosen “a high-concept story because I wanted to make some money”. The villains came from Brøderbund, not from the news. Doug Carlston’s earlier games had used the Bungeling Empire, and “all the bad guys were called Bungeling from then on”, Gorlin said, likening them to KAOS in the television comedy Get Smart. The same empire later appeared in Brøderbund’s Lode Runner and in Will Wright’s Raid on Bungeling Bay.

What the reviewers said

Computer Gaming World reviewed the Apple version in its July–August 1982 issue and judged its “3-D highly animated graphics” the best yet on the Apple. “The first time you play you may well find yourself muttering ‘incredible’ as you watch the screen.” In Electronic Games, Arnie Katz found the helicopter’s movement “something like a cork bobbing on a choppy sea”, and ended: “Give Broderbund a gold star.” The same magazine’s Arkie Awards gave it a Certificate of Merit: no game, the judges wrote, had “done a better job of giving the player the feel of actually being at the controls of a whirlybird”.

In Britain, Computer and Video Games reviewed an imported Apple copy in January 1983, calling it “the top selling game in the US for the Apple right now”, praising graphics that were “superb” and the hostages’ running, and pricing it at £19.95 plus VAT.

Conversions

Gorlin said he either did the computer versions himself or “hired guys to do them at my company, and so I kept tight control over them”. An Atari 400/800 version followed within months, later sold on cartridge. In Computer Gaming World in 1983, Allen Doum used it to show what went wrong when Apple games were converted: the Apple version used one joystick button to turn and the other to fire, but the Atari joystick had one button, so a short tap fired and a longer press turned the helicopter. “This means that the player will mistakenly turn instead of firing at times,” he wrote, and the Atari’s graphics lost colours the Apple had. On the Apple, the game’s animation and scrolling had been rare sights; “On Atari, it’s simply not as impressive.”

Creative Software licensed the game for a cartridge on the Commodore VIC-20, sold in Britain by Audiogenic of Reading at £24.95. Computer and Video Games reviewed it in April 1983, called it “Very addictive and definitely one of the best games now on sale for the Vic”, and opened the review by reminding readers of the embassy siege and President Carter’s “abortive attempt to rescue the hostages”. Brøderbund released a Commodore 64 version in 1983, programmed by Dane Bigham, and from 1985 the German label Ariolasoft sold it in Britain at £9.95 on cassette. Retro Gamer’s list of later versions includes the ColecoVision, the Atari 5200 and 7800, and MSX computers.

Sega’s arcade game

Choplifter went the opposite way to most games of its time: from a home computer to the arcades. Sega bought the licence and produced its own coin-op in 1985. “I didn’t do the coin-op version; that was Sega,” Gorlin told Edge. “But they put my name on it anyway, which was nice of them.” Sega’s version added a conventional score, more varied enemies and terrain, and, in Retro Gamer’s view, a “brutal difficulty”. Sega sent Gorlin a cocktail-table cabinet of it. Gary Carlston said Brøderbund had asked the Japanese manufacturer for lower royalties than other American companies, then audited its books in Japan. Along with Lode Runner, it was one of two Brøderbund games to become arcade machines. Two years later it was still at number ten in the Euromax chart of the most popular arcade games in Britain, printed by Computer and Video Games.

Sega also brought the game to its own consoles. The Master System cartridge was on Sega’s British release schedule for August 1987 at £19.95, and a version appeared on Nintendo’s console in Japan.

After Gorlin

Gorlin made two more games for Brøderbund: Airheart for the Apple II in 1986, a 3D sea rescue that used the Apple IIe’s double high-resolution mode, and its Atari ST and Amiga successor, Typhoon Thompson in Search for the Sea Child (1989). He had nothing to do with the later Choplifter games and told Retro Gamer in 2008 that he had not played any of them. Choplifter II appeared on the Game Boy in 1991, and Choplifter III on the Game Boy and Game Gear in 1993 and the Super NES in 1994. In 2012 inXile Entertainment released a 3D remake, Choplifter HD, for the Xbox 360 and other systems. Gorlin, meanwhile, turned to teaching West African music and dance.

The game’s influence showed up in other people’s work. Jordan Mechner, turned down by Brøderbund in 1982, was sent a copy, and said Choplifter “inspired me to make a game that would be even more cinematic”; the result was Karateka. Synapse’s Fort Apocalypse was accused of being a clone, which its author, Steve Hales, denied; Gorlin said he had seen it and “never had a problem with it”. The original program has not been released, but in 2024 the programmer Quinn Dunki published a fully commented reconstruction of its source code, made by disassembling the Apple II game.

Sources

Computer Gaming World, vol. 2 no. 4 (issue 5), July–August 1982, pp. 30 and 37: review of Choplifter! (price, formats, graphics, the Postal Service base, the Bungelings, the barracks and the 16-seat helicopter, the order of enemies, the Iranian desert, 64 hostages as the maximum score).
Electronic Games, vol. 1 no. 11, January 1983: Arkie Awards, p. 35 (Certificate of Merit, best computer audio/visual effects); Arnie Katz’s review in the computer games section, pp. 70–74.
Computer and Video Games issue 15, January 1983, p. 97: review of the imported Apple version. Issue 18, April 1983, p. 46: review of the VIC-20 version from Audiogenic. Issue 73, November 1987: Sega release schedule (Master System Choplifter, £19.95, August) and the Euromax arcade chart.
Allen Doum, “Atari Arena”, Computer Gaming World, vol. 3 no. 4, July–August 1983, p. 28: the Atari conversion; the same issue reports Brøderbund’s Commodore 64 versions.
Electronic Games, vol. 2 no. 10, December 1983: Creative Software advertisement for the VIC-20 cartridge, “licensed from Broderbund Software”.
Computer Games, vol. 3 no. 2, June 1984, pp. 26–27: Gorlin on his music studies, the Rand Corporation, his grandfather’s Apple, six months’ work, the May 1982 release, and tips.
ZZAP!64 issue 2, June 1985, p. 85: Ariolasoft’s Commodore 64 Choplifter at £9.95 on cassette.
“The Making of… Choplifter”, Edge issue 171, January 2007: the Iran hostage crisis; Rand; the house in Los Angeles; the Defender fan; the Bungeling Empire; choosing Brøderbund; Sega’s licence in 1985 and the coin-op; scoring; teaching West African music.
Craig Grannell, “The Making of: Choplifter!”, Retro Gamer issue 51, 2008, pp. 84–87: the helicopter, the 3D start, the Defender cabinet, assembly language and graph paper, the 1 MHz 6502, the joystick, scoring, Gorlin’s age, the conversions and his company, the arcade game and the cocktail cabinet, the sequels, Fort Apocalypse, Airheart and Typhoon Thompson.
Retro Gamer issue 44, 2007, p. 90: Fort Apocalypse and the clone accusation.
Mike Bevan, “From the archives: Broderbund”, Retro Gamer Collection volume 6, 2012, pp. 182–187: Gary Carlston on Gorlin, the computer shop, the helicopter being too hard to fly, Dane Bigham’s Commodore 64 version, the arcade licence and royalties. The same volume’s “Minority Report” (p. 56) describes Airheart.
David Crookes, “In the chair: Jordan Mechner”, Retro Gamer issue 112, March 2013, pp. 90–95: Choplifter and Karateka, as cited in the Karateka entry.
Sega Retro, “Choplifter” (web, secondary): Sega’s arcade release in 1985 and the Master System’s British release in August 1987 at £19.95. https://segaretro.org/Choplifter
Maurice Tan, “Review: Choplifter HD”, Destructoid, 11 January 2012 (web, secondary): inXile Entertainment’s remake and its platforms. https://www.destructoid.com/reviews/review-choplifter-hd/
“Disassembly of Apple II games published”, A2Central, September 2024 (web, secondary): Quinn Dunki’s reconstructed source. https://a2central.com/2024/09/sabotage-choplifter-lode-runner-disassembly/ ; the source is at https://github.com/blondie7575/ChoplifterReverse