“It’s unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public.”

Sopwith is a 1984 videogame made by David L. Clark for the original, seminal IBM PC model 5150. It sports the distinctive 4-color CGA palette and an equally distinctive PC speaker soundtrack. It’s also one of the oldest videogames still in active development, and I was surprised how enthralled I was learning about it. (First of all, you can play Sopwith in a browser. Choose “single player” and then “novice” first for the game to tell you about its unusual keyboard control scheme.) The current maintainer of the effort is Simon Howard. He wrote about Sopwith’s interesting history; I love appreciate this kind of approachable and caring preservation of obscure titles. The history is worth a read. From that, I learned a fascinating factoid. The game was intended as a demo for networking hardware, and the original author didn’t realize the game was “in circulation” for many years: Intended as a trade-show demo, it’s unclear how Sopwith escaped to the general public. David L. Clark didn’t…