Chopper Command

Chopper Command was released in 1982 by Activision as an action game in which the player pilots a combat helicopter and defends a convoy of ground vehicles against waves of enemy aircraft and paratroopers dropping in by parachute. The game combines a side-scrolling screen with a minimap at the top of the display, letting the player see the layout of enemies and their own convoy and decide which part of the battlefield needs defending right now, so as not to lose vehicles or let the enemy break through into the rear.

The gameplay is built around continuously shooting at incoming fighters and paratroopers, while the player must also keep an eye on the convoy's position, which advances across the landscape independently of the player's actions and can be destroyed if left unprotected too long. The helicopter can also be temporarily hidden from ground fire, adding another layer of tactics in deciding when to take risks and when to pull back and leave the convoy briefly unprotected. Technically, the game on the Atari 2600 uses smooth background scrolling and a relatively large number of moving objects at once, which was technically demanding for its time and was one of the strengths of Activision's output - back then one of the first independent development studios, founded by former Atari programmers who wanted proper recognition and authorship credit for their work on games.

Chopper Command was among Activision's commercially successful titles from the console's early years and was praised for its clarity, smooth action, and well-balanced sense of fighting for control of the battlefield. Today it remains a favorite example of how Activision's independent developers managed, on the Atari 2600's limited hardware, to pull off an action concept built around defending an object - a motif that later became a commonly used staple of the shooter genre on later gaming platforms too, from home computers to modern consoles, where defending a slowly moving convoy or base became a beloved game archetype.

Why play it: For fans of Activision's early action output, it offers a clear and smooth defense-of-the-base game whose core principle later became a beloved archetype across the whole genre.