BiPlane

A timed game. Two players shoot each other out of the sky as many times as possible before the game timer runs out. The left player flys the black BiPlane and the right player flys the white BiPlane. Very simple game play, but also very fun!

The game screen has a long bar at the bottom with a divider in the middle. That is your takeoff runway. Running into the divider causes you to crash. You must gain speed prior to takeoff then pull the up/down control back to take off. Once in the air a player can slow down if necessary. Anti-aircraft fire rings the outer edges of the screen. If you fly into it, you are shot down and crash. The sounds of the Biplane falling out of the sky and crashing are great. Each player's Biplane has it's own speaker. Once you make it into the air, the object of the game is simple; shoot each other out of the sky before time runs out. Score is kept at the top of the screen. When time is about ready to run out, the scores begin to flash until the end of the game. Each score is the same color as it's Biplane; either black or white. The game is kind of like an air-based version of Space Wars, but this game came out two years before Space Wars and uses a raster monitor.

If after shooting down an enemy plane you are close enough to fly over to where the new enemy plane appears, most of the time you can shoot him down before he has a chance to take off. With the speed control at slow, you can just hang in the air for quite some time, rack up points and make your opponent angry.

Supposedly, Fun Games (Oakland, CA) only produced three games: BiPlane, BiPlane 4, Tankers (Atari tank game).

A fourth prototype game called Kong is reported to have been designed and built, but the only known boardset is believed to be owned by ElDorado games. The object was to fly your biplane around the Empire State Building shooting at King Kong (he is holding Fay Wray also) while avoiding his attempts to swat you out of the sky. The game used a CPU (2650?) and the animation was gorgeous!

A short upright cabinet with woodgrain sides and front. The monitor bezel has some great artwork with a WWI battle scene on the bottom showing cannons, men, air explosions, etc... On the left side of the monitor are the words 'Action', 'Thrills', 'Fun' and on the right side are the words 'Bang', 'Boom', 'Pow'. Both sets of words are inside either cloud shapes or explosion shapes. All over the bezel are pictures of Biplanes engaged in dogfights. The marquee bezel has the game name in the center with two Biplanes, one on each side. Most of the monitor bezel and marquee are in red. The marquee is originally lit with a long incandecent lightbulb called a 'Lumaline' bulb that glows very nicely, however a bit warm. The control panel has silkscreened graphics which demostrate the controls function and game instructions.

Mostly the same board set, wiring harness and controls as Fun Games' Tanker.

Instruction manual dated January 1976.

This game uses a four-card, card-cage setup that operates without a CPU. The rack is powered by a +5VDC linear supply which can be easily subsituted with one of today's switching power supplies. The game has switches for 25/50 cent play, 50/60 Hz power, individual volume controls for each speaker, five pots for setting the pitch and tone of sound effects, a pot for setting the white Bi-plane's shot distance to be the same as the black, and a pot to adjust the length of the game.

The +5 volt power supply had a massive heat problem. A fan would have helped here. The marquee is lit by a Lumiline bulb that is expensive and very unreliable.