An homage to Dan Gorlin's 1982 Apple II classic — rebuilt from scratch in a single source file. No art files, no sound files: every pixel and every bleep is generated by code at runtime.

64 hostages are held in 4 barracks across the border. Blast the barracks open, land your chopper, load up to 16 at a time, and ferry them home to the post. Tanks hunt you on the ground, drone-jets streak in at your altitude, and one careless bomb can kill the people you came to save.

Rescue 40 or more to complete the mission. Rescue all 64 to become a legend.

Don't like the defaults? Pick CONFIGURE KEYS in the menu and rebind anything — your changes are saved automatically and remembered next time you play.

Grab the latest build for Windows or Linux from the Releases page — no installation needed, just run it.

• Odin — a modern programming language built for exactly this kind of thing: fast programs like games, with simple, readable code. The whole game is one file, main.odin.
• raylib — a beloved open-source library that handles the "talking to your computer" parts: opening a window, drawing shapes, reading the keyboard, and playing audio. Odin ships with it built in.
• Procedural everything — there are no image or audio files in this project. The helicopter, the mountains, the moon, the explosions: all drawn live out of rectangles, circles, and triangles. The sound effects (laser zaps, explosions, the rotor thump-thump-thump) are synthesized as raw waveforms when the game starts — the same way 1980s sound chips did it.

You only need one tool: the Odin compiler. raylib comes bundled with it.

1. Install Odin — follow the official guide at odin-lang.org/docs/install.

• Linux: you'll need clang and make installed (e.g. sudo apt install clang make on Ubuntu/Pop!_OS), then build Odin per the guide.
• Windows: install via the prebuilt release zip from Odin's releases — unzip and add the folder to your PATH.

2. Build the game — from this project's folder:

odin build . -out:choplifter

On Windows that produces choplifter.exe; on Linux, choplifter.

3. Fly:

./choplifter        # Linux
choplifter.exe      # Windows

For a faster, smaller release binary:

odin build . -out:choplifter -o:speed

• Key remaps are stored in a tiny text file, choplifter.keys, next to the game. Delete it to restore defaults.
• If your machine has no working audio device, the game simply runs silently — it won't crash.

Watch the tanks. Don't shoot the people you came to save.