Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Harrier Attack

The player controls a Sea Harrier fighter, looking sideways onto a right-to-left scrolling seascape and landscape. The aim of the game is to take off from a carrier, attack ships and land targets, avoid the odd missile and enemy fighter, then land back on the carrier again. Although the game was a work of fiction, it was inspired by the 1982 Falklands War, in which the Sea Harrier had played a major role. One interesting little quirk to the game was that, it was possible to bomb your own ship as you took off from it. If you did this, when you returned it would no longer be there (having sunk, presumably) and being unable to land on it your plane would just continue flying until it ran out of fuel and crashed. Durell managed to get the executable size down to just under 9 kilobytes, which allowed for a fast loading time from cassette. The game sold over 250,000 copies in total.