Play Choplifter! Online

Summary

Choplifter! lets you pilot a little helicopter that can point left, right, or straight at the screen, letting you fire in any of those directions without having to turn the craft. The forward‑facing stance is especially handy for taking out the ground‑based tanks that pepper the battlefield.

Rescuing the hostages is a careful dance: four buildings each hold sixteen captives, and the chopper can only carry sixteen at a time. After blasting a building’s wall to free the prisoners, you must land, let them board, and then ferry them back to the start. Because the enemy catches on, each successive sortie feels riskier than the last.

Landing on a hostage or blocking an exit will instantly kill them, and while you’re on the ground enemy tanks can pepper you with fire—only by lifting off can you return fire. Jet fighters swoop in with missiles or drop bombs, and an alien spacecraft later appears as a near‑unstoppable menace.

Dan Gorlin originally imagined a 3‑D rescue, but hardware limits forced a classic 2‑D side‑scroll. He built the game in six months, borrowing film‑camera tricks for the visual style and swapping a grim "Game Over" for a simple "The End." The first demo was deemed too realistic for a helicopter sim, so Broderbund helped simplify the controls, and Gorlin’s love of Defender inspired the hostage‑saving premise.

Storyline

In Choplifter! you take the seat of a combat‑helicopter pilot tasked with a daring rescue mission inside the hostile lands of the Bungeling Empire. The game’s backstory explains that the hostages are delegates bound for a United Nations Conference on Peace and Child Rearing, held captive in enemy barracks. Your job is to scoop them up and ferry them safely to a nearby U.S. Postal Service building while fending off tanks and other enemy fire. The helicopter itself was smuggled into the country hidden inside a disguised mail‑sorting machine, giving you a covert way to enter the conflict zone. The simple yet tense gameplay revolves around careful pick‑ups, quick drops, and constant combat against the empire’s forces.