A playthrough of Nintendo's 1991 flight simulation game for the Super NES, Pilotwings.
Pilotwings was one of the SNES's launch titles released alongside Super Mario World and F-Zero, and between the three, it was clear just how deadly serious Nintendo was in maintaining its dominance over the market - they pulled no punches in showing off their new 16-bit machine's fanciest features.
Though it was the least popular game in the first-party launch line-up, Pilotwings was arguably the most impressive of the trio. Relying almost entirely on the SNES's "mode 7", a feature that allowed for full scaling and rotation effects to be applied to a bitmapped background layer, Pilotwings delivered an amazing 3D experience that was like nothing else we had ever seen before. I mean, sure, F-Zero delivered speed, but it all took place on the ground. Pilotwings removed the wheels (or whatever you'd call the equivalent part on a hover car), and in doing so provided an unprecedented sense of freedom that still holds up well today.
Pilotwings poses you as a student at an amateur flight school, and the game revolves around earning licenses by mastering increasingly difficult lessons. There are a good number of events on offer: In the light plane, you've got to fly through hoops and arches and safely land on the runway. In skydiving, you leap from a helicopter and pitch your body to fly through hoops before opening your parachute for a safe landing. Rocketbelt gives you a jetpack and tasks you with touching various targets, and finally, Hang Gliding has you riding thermal updrafts to hit a required altitude before navigating your way to the landing pad.
You also get a chance at a goofy special bonus round if you do particularly well, and these have you doing things like dive-bombing a pool as a penguin and bouncing on trampolines with wings strapped on your back.
The final stage of each round changes things up quite a bit - in an amusingly melodramatic turn of events, terrorists kidnap all of the flight school instructors. It's up to you, of course, to fly the combat helicopter over the island where they're being held, destroy the anti-air batteries, and rescue them.
Pilotwings is one of those games that appears simple on the surface, but there is a lot of depth and challenge to it - the later lessons can be extremely difficult. You have to consider approach angles, wind speed and heading, gravity, and your vehicle's handling quirks all at at once, and while it might feel a bit overwhelming at first, it doesn't take too long to get used to.
Once you have the mechanics down, the real joy in Pilotwings' gameplay comes from the steady improvements you'll make as you gradually master its nuances. The controls are silky smooth and responsive and rarely require the use of more than two or three buttons.
Finally, the presentation was clearly the game's big selling point, and the reasons are obvious. The stages are surprisingly dense with detail, the multiple camera options allow you to adjust the view for gauging depth, and the framerate is impossibly smooth. And that's the one thing that screenshots of Pilotwings unfortunately cannot convey - as nice as it looks in a photo, the feeling of full 3D freedom at 60fps cannot be understated.
In 1990, most 3D games' framerates maxxed out in the teens on high-end computers, so it's not difficult to imagine the impact Pilotwings had on people when it was new. And to think it was running on a $200 video game system, not a $3000+ 386 PC!
Pilotwings was an ambitious title that capitalized on all of Nintendo's strengths and talents to provide something special.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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