Chopper Attack, released in 1997, straps you into a combat helicopter on the Nintendo 64. It was developed by Japan's SETA Corporation and brought west by Midway, a publisher best known for its arcade pedigree.

Helicopter action games were a discipline of their own in the nineties: they offered free movement over a battlefield, ground-target destruction and missile duels, without the complexity of full-blooded flight simulators. With its capacity for smooth 3D graphics, the Nintendo 64 was a natural home for the concept.

The N64 library was not exactly overflowing with action titles for older players, as the console lived mainly off family-friendly first-party hits. Projects like Chopper Attack filled that gap, and today they form the less-charted layer of the machine's catalogue, the kind collectors only reach in their second wave of digging.

The game seats a single pilot and centres on mission objectives spread across open areas. For fans of military action from the first 3D console generation it is a typical specimen of a genre that has practically vanished from modern gaming, squeezed out by full simulators on one side and cinematic shooters on the other.

Missions leaned on freedom of approach, letting the pilot choose target order and adjust the machine's loadout, which kept repeat sorties fresh. A helicopter is also the ideal game vehicle: it hovers, reverses and drops sharply, moving like nothing fixed-wing, and that manoeuvrability made the genre a discipline of its own.

For Chopper Attack, OldGame.cz provides the release year, both companies involved and a gallery of mission footage.