The Helicopter Game Is The Most Elegant Web Game Ever Created
We're celebrating web games this week on Digg, and our top web game of all time is the deceptively addictive Helicopter Game. Why?
It's so damn simple.
CLICK TO START
CLICK AND HOLD LEFT MOUSE BUTTON TO GO UP
RELEASE TO GO DOWN
Those are all the instructions you need to get going, and honestly, they're almost superfluous.
It's just hard enough. The learning curve for the Helicopter Game is nearly non-existent — I'd hazard a guess that the number of people who tried it and stopped because it was "too hard" is miniscule. Chances are, when you click play the very first time, you'll immediately hit the ground. The second time, you'll figure out how much you need to click to maneuver. And then you're all set to go.
But it's also not easy. You have to be engaged, you have to be smart about how you're maneuvering, and even when you're in the zone, you're probably going to fuck something up. It's compulsively playable: you always feel like you should have done better — just another split second click and you would have survived! — but it never ends up getting simple enough to be boring.
It just feels right. There's the one crucial way in which the Helicopter Game is not dead simple. The physics of the helicopter — specifically, the way it takes a split second for a click to take effect and your chopper starts to climb and the way your chopper climbs more steeply the longer you hold the mouse — make the game surprisingly visceral. That little animated chopper has some heft to it. Switch over to games like Flappy Bird or the crappy Helicopter Game knock-off apps and they'll feel lightweight. Flappy Bird came out years after the Helicopter Game, and while the concepts are similar, it's just simply worse. Every mouse click results in the same little jump, the bird's movement is cartoonishly removed from the laws of physics, and there's no room for elegance; in the Helicopter Game, you swoop gracefully through gaps, in Flappy Bird, you awkwardly bounce through them.
And when I say that the Helicopter Game is "visceral," I mean it. You feel it. That sensation you get in the pit of your stomach when your elevator jerks downwards or when your roller coaster car first starts to plummet? I feel that, in miniature, every time I release the mouse and my chopper dives toward the green beneath it. It's exhilarating, which feels like a deeply weird thing to say about a two-dimensional Flash game with one moving element that never actually moves that fast.
It doesn't need you to think: And thank god for it. Take Helicopter Game 2009, a well-intentioned update to the original that adds a fuel tank to the equation, forcing you to think more carefully about how often and how long you click to thrust. It's not as fun as the original — the sensation and satisfaction of your chopper swooping around obstacles is obfuscated by the need to grab fuel.
Or take "2048." When the tile game took over the web and mobile gaming world several years ago, I found it enjoyable in much the same way as I found the Helicopter Game — right up until I figured out that there was in fact a strategy that turned the game into a matter of how willing you were to mindlessly swipe back and forth until you hit that 2048 square.
The Helicopter Game cannot be figured out. You can get better at navigating through tight spaces by virtue of either 1) playing enough that you develop a better feel for the game or 2) sufficiently emptying your mind that you briefly find yourself in the Helicopter Game Zone, but every game is still a fresh challenge and there's no way around it.
It demands your full attention. Between our attention spans and our mental health, we're probably doing ourselves a great deal of damage constantly flipping between our various feeds, incessantly tracking down whatever latest Bad Thing that has happened on Twitter or trying to keep up with the performative demands of social media. There was a time when it wasn't like this, when zoning out on the internet meant actually zoning out and thinking about something other than the internet, and that was the time of Helicopter Game. And maybe we should go back to that, at least occasionally.
You can play the Helicopter Game over at Seethru.
