Uploaded April 2024 | Updated September 2026, 5 hours ago

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Choplifter was originally a horizontal shmup created in 1982 by Dan Gorlin for the Apple II, but was ported over to many different systems after that. Eventually, Sega did a remake of the game for arcades in 1985. Then, they developed and released a port of that remake for the Sega Master System in 1986 in North America, one of the first games released on the system in that region.

To call this a horizontal shmup may be a bit misleading. This game has very little to do with arcade shmups from this time period. It's probably closer to a euro shmup in some ways. For instance, this game has inertia in the movement, probably to better simulate the movement of a helicopter. That's normally a no-no for arcade shmups. Also, the main goal of this game is not to kill the enemies but to rescue hostages. Just about all the scoring in this game comes from doing that. Last, the game does not auto scroll.

However, despite not being a traditional shmup, this game still succeeds because of its focus on rescuing hostages and being a rudimentary 2D helicopter simulator. It's designed well enough to know what it is and what it is not. This game is also very fair for the most part especially in the first loop, outside of a little bit of RNG. The movement does feel believable for a helicopter and moves reasonably fast once you get going. You also get a minimum of three lives for each stage, meaning that you can screw up in one stage a little bit and not necessarily have it affect you later on. Plus, you can get an extend per stage if you rescue 20 hostages.

Speaking of rescuing hostages, the goal of each stage is to rescue 40 hostages. Whenever you bring them back to base, you get points and the bonus multiplies by two with each consecutive hostage dropped off. At the end, you can get a 100,000 point bonus if no hostages die during the stage. You can still get this bonus even if you die once or twice. Unfortunately, if even one hostage dies, that end of stage bonus almost entirely disappears, which is a bit harsh but encourages clean play for scoring.

As far as this port goes, it does make some changes compared to the arcade version. One, the city level is cut from this version. You get the first three stages (desert, sea, and cave), and those repeat again with some small variations before you get the short ending screen. The game does loop infinitely after that ending though. Two, the fuel gauge is gone, so players don't have to worry about that in this port. There are other differences as well, but those are the main ones I can think of. Obviously, the graphics are scaled down going from arcade to console, but the results are very impressive for an early Master System game. The parallex scrolling on Stage 1 is excellent and a great showcase of what the system could do. The music and sound effects don't stand out a whole lot but get the job done.

00:00 Intro
00:19 Stage 1
03:19 Stage 2
06:28 Stage 3
10:29 Stage 4
14:00 Stage 5
17:00 Stage 6
20:49 Loop 2