History of Sopwith Illustration: IBM PC 5150 with Sopwith start screen

At the time of writing, Sopwith is approaching its 40th birthday. Sopwith is a very old game, and has an interesting history that deserves to be documented.

First released in 1984, Sopwith was one of the first games for the IBM PC. Released less than three years after the release of the IBM PC in August 1981, Sopwith sits within the “first wave” of games developed for the system. The PC remains an important platform for games to this day.

Sopwith is one of the earliest networked games, and indeed was developed as a demo program for the proprietary Imaginet system, an early form of LAN developed by BMB Compuscience of Ontario, Canada. Sopwith was not the first networked game; other contemporary examples exist, including Maze War and SGI Dogfight. However, at the time of its release there were still relatively few other examples. An unfortunate detail is that the game only worked with the proprietary BMB hardware and drivers, meaning that very few people were able to use this feature.

Sopwith is one of the oldest video games still in active development today. In 2018, PC Gamer published a list of old games still being maintained and developed. Sopwith is not on the list, but the only game on the list arguably older is Hack (1984), released several months earlier and still under development in the form of NetHack. SDL Sopwith is directly derived from the source code to the original DOS versions, and still includes changelog comments that date all the way back to 1984.