Sopwith 2 (1985): The CGA Biplane Game That Started a Genre and Then Perfected It
Legacy titleRating band: Well-regarded · Year: 1985 · Developer/Publisher: BMB Compuscience · Designer: David Clark · Platform: DOS · Theme: Multiplayer
Before there was a recognizable genre for “fly a small plane around a level and blow things up,” there was Sopwith, and its 1985 sequel is the version most people actually remember playing. Sopwith 2 is a side-scrolling biplane game split between two colors, cyan and magenta, where your job is to destroy every enemy building and vehicle on the map through shooting, bombing, or simply flying into them. It sounds almost too simple to have spawned an entire lineage of games, and yet here we are.
The original Sopwith is where the real oddity of its history shows up. BMB Compuscience built the game, according to its own designer, largely to demonstrate a proprietary networking product called Imaginet, and the multiplayer mode grew out of that goal rather than the other way around. That mode ended up supporting eight combined players, four human and four computer, at a time when almost nothing else on DOS attempted anything close to that. The original’s AI and physics were thin, which is exactly the gap Sopwith 2 was built to close.
And it closes it in nearly every direction at once. Enemy planes fly with real intelligence instead of scripted patterns. New enemy types show up, including birds that exist purely to be an annoyance rather than a threat with any narrative logic. Terrain deforms as bombs and crashes chew it up, which turns each playthrough of a level into something visibly different from the last. A real-time radar and mapping display gives you information the original never bothered to provide. None of these are small tweaks; together they’re the difference between a rough proof of concept and a genuinely tight arcade game.
One detail worth calling out on its own: Sopwith 2 was coded with an internal timer that keeps the game running at its intended speed regardless of how fast the underlying processor is. That’s not a common feature for 1985, and it’s the reason the game still plays correctly on modern hardware instead of degenerating into an unplayable blur, the same trick that keeps a small handful of other DOS-era classics like Alley Cat usable today without a slowdown utility.
David Clark, the original designer, didn’t stop at the 1985 release either. In 2000 he put out Sopwith: The Author’s Edition as freeware, widely regarded as the definitive version of the game, refining the design further with the benefit of hindsight. That’s a rare thing for a mid-1980s arcade title: the person who built it came back fifteen years later and got the last word on his own work.
How to run it today
Sopwith 2 runs without complications in DOSBox, and given the tiny footprint of the original files, setup amounts to mounting the folder and launching the executable. Keyboard controls map directly with no remapping required.
Compatibility: DOS (via DOSBox) · Controls: Keyboard · Setup difficulty: Low
Legal status
BMB Compuscience no longer operates, but the Sopwith lineage had a real official afterlife beyond this specific release: the original creator’s own remake of Sopwith is currently sold on Steam, built decades after the DOS original. Sopwith 2 itself isn’t the version being sold there, and no standalone rerelease of this exact game exists, but the franchise clearly isn’t an orphaned one.
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The original Sopwith is the obvious companion piece, along with Jetstrike and Night Raid if you want more of the same fly-and-destroy arcade formula from adjacent developers of the period.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to play the original Sopwith first?
No. Sopwith 2 is a direct improvement on the original in nearly every respect, from AI to terrain to enemy variety, and it stands on its own without requiring familiarity with its predecessor.
What changed between Sopwith and Sopwith 2?
Sopwith 2 added smarter enemy planes, more enemy types including birds, bigger explosions, terrain that deforms as you fight, and a real-time radar and mapping display. The original had weak AI and almost no physics model by comparison.
How did the multiplayer work?
The original Sopwith supported up to 8 combined human and computer players over BMB Compuscience's own Imaginet network hardware, which the game was reportedly built partly to showcase. Sopwith 2 kept the multiplayer spirit but the Imaginet-specific networking didn't carry forward into later freeware editions.
Why does Sopwith 2 still play at the right speed on a modern PC?
It was coded with an internal timer that decouples game speed from processor speed, a trick shared with a handful of other DOS classics from the same era. That means it runs at its intended pace on a modern CPU instead of becoming unplayably fast.