Dozens of hostages are held in enemy barracks across the border. Fly your VTOL gunship out, crack the barracks open, land beside the survivors, load up to 8 at a time (16 in Classic mode) and ferry them home to the landing pad at base. Lose all lives — or all hostages — and the mission fails.
Left half of the screen is a virtual stick — drag to fly.
FIRE shoots, hold to keep
shooting. The nose swings toward the way you fly, and your cannon fires along the chopper's inclination — dive slightly to rake ground targets.
FLARE activates a countermeasure to jam drones.
Quickly double-tap FLARE for an evasive roll. The airframe is invulnerable to bullets and drones during the roll.
BOMB releases a free-falling bomb straight down — huge blast radius, so keep hostages clear.
In WHITEOUT EXTRACTION, the BOMB control becomes WINCH: use it to lower the rescue sling over a climber, then raise them clear of the mountain for transport.
WASD or arrows · fly
SPACE — fire
E/C · drop bomb
R/V · flare · double-tap for evasive roll · 2s cooldown
P · pause
M · mute
F12 · full screen
Destroyed enemies may drop supply crates — roughly half the time. Each crate parachutes down, settles on the ground and waits there until you fly into it, so nothing is ever lost to a timer.
Instant bonuses
HULL PATCH (green) — repairs +25 hull.
REINFORCED SHIELD (cyan) — +30% max hull and the same amount healed on the spot; stacks up to
3 times, after which it simply tops you up by +20 hull.
BOMBS (amber) — +3 bombs, up to your bomb limit.
FLARE (violet) — +1 flare, up to your flare limit.
Timed bonuses — each lasts 35s, banks up to 60s if you grab another, shows a
countdown chip on the HUD and calls out at 5s left.
AFTERBURNER (cyan) — +45% airspeed.
RAPID FIRE (orange) — cannon cooldown drops from 0.11s to 0.05s, a bit over 2x rate of fire.
AP ROUNDS (purple) — armour-piercing shells that one-shot most enemies and bite far deeper into
tanks, jets, barrack walls and doors.
PLASMA CANNON (magenta) — fires an extra heavy plasma bolt about every 0.9s while you hold fire.
The Cheat mode switch on the title screen, just under the difficulty chips, arms a permanent set of bonuses for every sector you fly while it is on: 2.2x rate of fire, a reinforced hull (250 instead of 100), increased airspeed, extra bombs, extra flares and +30% available mission time — including on every respawn and resupply. The setting is saved, so it stays as you left it after a refresh. Fair warning: any sector cleared with cheat mode ON does not count toward the NO CHEATER commendation.
Every sector runs on a hard clock shown at the top of the HUD. Sector 01 gives you the most room; each sector after it tightens the window while the hostage count climbs. Hit zero and the run is scrubbed. Every second left on the clock is worth 8 points, so a fast, clean sweep pays.
No two sectors share a skyline. Prisons sit on hilltops, on cliff ledges, inside quarry terraces and down sinkhole shafts you must descend into. Watch the ground line — it climbs, drops away and undercuts, and a hard contact still breaks your gear.
Dan Gorlin came to Choplifter after studying music and spending three years doing artificial-intelligence research at RAND. When that job ended, he began experimenting with an Apple II borrowed from his grandfather. Fascinated by helicopters, he first built a controllable helicopter; a local Defender fan later suggested adding little people to pick up. Gorlin recalled that about six months of experimentation produced Choplifter!, which Brøderbund Software published for Apple II in 1982.
The Iran hostage crisis became strongly associated with the game, but Gorlin said it was not a conscious tie-in during development; he only recognized the connection after publication, and later believed the public mood helped the game's success. Choplifter also stood apart from most action games by tracking hostages lost, aboard, and rescued instead of using a conventional points score. It became a major Apple II hit and ranked first in Softalk's 1982 readers' poll.
*Apple II Hi-Res addresses 280 horizontal dots, but colour generation imposes pixel-placement restrictions; effective horizontal colour detail is 140 positions.
A modern binary-identical reverse-engineering of the original confirms that Choplifter is a single-loading 48 KB game: once booted, it does not access the disk again. Its main loop uses double-buffered page flipping, flipping the Apple II graphics buffers in hardware and swapping the render buffer each frame. The original release's copy protection was incompatible with the later 64 KB Apple IIe; Brøderbund patched that in a later release.
🚁 Solo game creator. The original Apple II game itself is credited to Dan Gorlin. The commercial package's cover illustration was by Marc Ericksen, so claims that Gorlin literally created every part of the packaged product are too broad.
🎮 Three-way facing. The helicopter can face left, right, or toward the viewer independently of its direction of travel. Facing the viewer lets the player attack ground targets — one of the original game's most distinctive control ideas.
🧭 It began as a 3D idea. Gorlin said his first intention was to make Choplifter in 3D, but he abandoned that approach on the period hardware and made the game a side-scroller.
💾 Entire game resident in RAM. Once the original finishes booting, the working game fits in 48 KB and never needs to read the floppy again.
📺 Sega's 1985 arcade remake. Sega licensed the concept and substantially expanded it; Gorlin said Sega handled the arcade design and artwork without his involvement. The arcade hardware is Sega System 2, with a Z80 main CPU at 4 MHz and a 256 × 224 display.
🎬 Documented creative influence. Jordan Mechner later described how Choplifter's tiny characters and its emotionally framed ending influenced his thinking about narrative and emotion in games, an idea he carried into Karateka.
⚠️ Hostages are genuinely vulnerable. Enemy tank fire can kill freed hostages, and the player can also kill them by firing carelessly or landing on them. Protecting civilians is therefore part of the original game's core challenge.
🌐 Rotor Rescue's Choplifter DNA. The rescue-and-return loop, destructible barracks, tank attacks, and enemy jet fighters all echo the 1982 original. Rotor Rescue's standard 8-seat capacity is its own design choice, not a feature inherited from the Apple II game.