Firehawk
A NES helicopter combat and rescue game, expanding the ideas of Operation Gunship into a scrolling console experience.
Image credits and source
Original cover / promotional artwork
Credit: Codemasters — artwork belongs to its respective rights holders
Source: The Oliver Twins archive
Game at a glance
- Status
- Classic
- Released
- 1991
- Platforms
- Nintendo Entertainment System, Atari ST, Amiga
- Genres
- Shoot 'em up
- Developer
- The Oliver Twins (NES); additional teams (computer ports)
- Publisher
- Codemasters
Development and publication
Development: The Oliver Twins (NES); additional teams (computer ports). Publication: Codemasters.
The named development credit refers to the original or specifically identified version. Other ports and later re-releases may have different development teams.
Making the game
Having completed The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy on the NES we appreciated how powerful the NES was for creating scrolling character mapped play areas with overlaid hardware sprites (64 x 8x8 pixel sprites). This was the perfect technical requirement for our vision of Operation Gunship, where you flew a helicopter gunship over islands shooting and launching missiles at enemies buildings and vehicles. Your objective was to collect the Commandos trapped on the islands and return them to your command ship. The more destruction wreaked the better!
It did work very well although there was an annoying bug on the scrolling that took over a week to solve! Well, mostly solve, still very occasionally a wrong character will scroll on the edge of the map! So annoying! The 8 bit processing capabilities of the 6502 meant little processing time was given to the AI for the enemy vehicles.
Whilst it reviewed quite well, sales were low due to massive delays caused by attempting to release unlicensed NES games in America.