Airheart
Name: Airheart
Programmer(s): Dan Gorlin
Publisher: Brøderbund Software
Year: 1986
Description: In this game, you play a "half bird-half man" who flys around in a tiny water speeder just above the water looking for a hidden sword. All action takes place at sea. The player first encounters two mysterious figures draped in robes and looking somewhat Jedi with a touch of Day-Glo. With their magic, they create the player and speeder, then demand that you go and find the sword. There is no land in Airheart, aside from some tiny buoys where you encounter various mechanical creatures that are guarding the sword. To get to the sword from the starting place, the player must pop one of the bubbles that comes out of the buoys and follow the star as it races across the screen. The star will the hit another buoy, thereby releasing the guards who, though their various powers, try and stop Airheart from climbing down into the buoy. Shooting the baddies turns them into harmless blocks which you must then pick up before they turn back. Each of the buoys has two guards. Once both have been shot and picked up, Airheart must bump up against the buoy. From there he'll strap on his back pack and jump into the hole in the middle of the buoy. Then it's back into the speeder and off to another bouy.
Airheart was one of the first games that used double hires of the Apple 2c, thus making it impossible to run on the Apple 2+. Airheart was programmed by Dan Gorlin, who also programmed Choplifter.
If you grew up gaming in the 80s, chances are you know the name Choplifter. Dan Gorlin’s helicopter rescue classic is remembered as one of the defining Apple II titles. But his follow-up, Airheart, often gets overlooked. For me, Airheart was one of those hidden gems that stuck in my memory for decades.
I first played Airheart on a borrowed floppy that had the name scrawled on the label in marker. No manual, no box, no clue what the official release looked like nor did I care. That just how it was in those days. We traded the games, we played the games, but the packaging and the extras were things you only saw in magazine ads.
Fast forward to my 40 some odd years and here I am I hunting down a complete boxed copy on eBay, spending over $250 for it. Real box, real manual, real artwork and... COPIED DISK. I don't think Broderbund released games on Elephant Disks. Anyhow, what made Airheart was the use of double-res graphics. The Apple II normally topped out at six colors in hi-res mode. Double-res was capable of rendering 16 colors, but it came at the cost of CPU performance. Somehow the programmers made Airheart super smooth, combining speed with the double-res graphics with little or no lag.
The gist of the game was fairly simple. You guided the hero on a jet-powered sled, something akin to a motorized inner tub, searching for three treasures. The is a sword, a goblet, and the harp. Gather all these first then it's time to rescue a lost infant prince. Standing in your way are several kinds of monsters or robots. Each has their own annoying style to block & even destroy you. You must blast them all to turn them into tiny "pills" which you must then run your "inner tube" over to collect, hurrying to do this otherwise they revert back to their annoying large selves and it's back to attacking you.
Once you rescue the baby prince you've won the game and get to see a "star wars scroller" of programmers and other involved in making the game.