The Super Nintendo Earns Its Wings

Pilotwings Review

Genre: Flight Simulation
Number of Players: 1
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Release Date: December 1, 1990 (JP), August 23, 1991 (US), 1992 (EU)
Platform: Super Nintendo
Also Available On: Nintendo Switch Online

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In the early ‘90s, a new video game console was only as strong as its launch titles. Even if a new system only had three or four notable launch games, it always sold better than the ones that claimed to be an entertainment powerhouse but had no games worth the asking price—I’m looking at you, Philips CD-i. Bonus points if a launch title managed to rethink old gameplay mechanics and create an entirely fresh experience for its target audience.

Nintendo understood this concept well when they released the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). Included among the short list of launch titles for their new console was Pilotwings—a flight simulation that explored a variety of aerial sports seldom touched on before then. It began in 1988 as an early tech demo called Dragonfly, designed to show off the “Mode 7” scaling and rotation graphical capabilities of the SNES. Pilotwings was developed into a full-fledged game that let players take to the skies in a way never before possible on a home console.

The game consists of eight lessons broken down into individual courses where you fly or fall through a set of goals. Each lesson is led by an instructor who introduces the basic outline and goals of the course. Each curriculum awards points that contribute to your total score for that lesson. Meeting the minimum scoring requirement awards you a certification, allowing you to pass on to the next lesson.

The game is pleasantly approachable for a flight simulation of its era. Back then, flight sims on home consoles were still playing catch-up with the more robust offerings on personal computers. Most times, you end up with a game that tries to do too much with too little in terms of visual presentation and what the player is expected to do with limited controller inputs. But Pilotwings, while maintaining a sense of realism, never overwhelms the player with too many variables that interfere with the enjoyment of performing the task at hand.

One example is the light plane training courses. Since the biplane isn’t a high-powered machine, you can’t do barrel rolls or loop-the-loops. The game realistically simulates wind resistance when banking left or right. If you suddenly pull up, you hear the engine compensating for the change in altitude; if you suddenly plunge it downward full force, the plane responds as if gravity is pulling it to the ground as you scramble to avoid a crash landing. However, the game keeps things simple by only requiring you to use the A and B buttons to accelerate or decelerate. Besides that, your attention is freed up to concentrate on maneuvering the plane with the d-pad and landing successfully.

The enjoyment of playing Pilotwings is also mainly due to its variety of aerial lessons. Initially, I expected the game would only focus on piloting various aircraft. But I was pleasantly surprised to be presented with multiple activities like skydiving, one of the first I tried. While researching to find instances of skydiving in video games before the SNES, I was hard-pressed to find anything beyond two titles—Sky Diver (1979) and Parachute (1983)—both of which were Atari 2600 games (Sky Diver also having an arcade release before that).

Both games featured 2D stick figure characters. The simple goal was to move the jumper left or right to land safely on the ground below. While this was a novel concept at the time, both games were severely limited in how they could depict the action. While they were not terrible games per se, neither were they the most engaging experiences.

In Pilotwings, the skydiving courses are shown from a 3rd-person perspective as your character leaps from a helicopter and begins his descent. Your goal is to pass through a series of rings using the d-pad to maneuver your character as needed and deploy the parachute when prompted. Finally, you must touch down in a designated landing zone marked by flashing borders and moving platforms. Landing in the smallest area of a specific zone nets you the highest point value.

The rocket belt training courses have you flying around like James Bond in Thunderball. The goal is to pilot the character through rings and vertical markers before landing in one of the areas indicated, similarly to the skydiving events. Besides your dexterity with the d-pad, maneuverability is greatly determined by how well you operate the high and low speed thrusters, mapped to the A and B buttons, which allow you to move faster or with greater precision, respectively.

Pressing the L/R shoulder buttons will switch the camera to a top-down perspective, providing a precise view of the area directly beneath you. I always appreciated the thoughtful inclusion of that feature because it eliminates the possibility of an inaccurate landing due to the obscurity of aerial movement in a 3D space.

My favorite course is the hang gliding lesson, in which you must fly into thermal air currents to reach the required altitude before landing in the marked area. For an early SNES game, there's plenty here to keep your attention. Each task can be easier or more complex than others. For instance, piloting the biplane is relatively easy, but landing after a hang gliding session requires more thought and precision.

Successfully landing on the moving platform in the skydiving or rocket belt lessons unlocks bonus stages. From the skydiving course, you help a penguin perform a high dive into a pool. The rocket belt bonus stage has you guiding a man with artificial wings to the end goal by jumping on multiple platforms. Despite having played this game many times in years past, I only recently discovered these hidden extras. They’re silly and whimsical, yet still on-brand with the game’s aerial theme.

In later courses, the game requires multiple tasks for a passing grade, such as getting your plane off the runway, flying through an extended series of rings, and returning to the runway all in one go. The skydiving lessons get trickier when the landing targets become smaller and are surrounded by a wider water area. As you may have guessed, plunking into the water results in a poor score.

All of this leads to you receiving a special assignment to pilot an attack helicopter and rescue your trainers. You should be well accustomed to the controls and how they function by this time. Albeit brief, the rescue mission is a welcome inclusion that helps Pilotwings feel complete. After the first rescue mission, the game restarts in “Expert Mode,” which continues your lessons with the same types of curriculum but under various weather conditions and a stricter scoring requirement. The expert portion will take a while to master, but it’s time well spent.

As mentioned earlier, Pilotwings was one of the premier games to show off the flat 3D scaling abilities of the SNES. But it was also part of a significant shift in the audio quality possible on a home console. Most of the soundtrack was composed by Soyo Oka, with Koji Kondo (of Super Mario Bros. fame) supervising the work. The SNES’ sample-based audio capabilities meant it could mimic instruments like the piano, flute, bass, and many others in a way that sounded closer to the real thing than what was typically possible on game systems that preceded it.

Soyo flexes her musical prowess with her masterful compositions of ambient jazz, creating a relaxing experience that goes perfectly with the menu screens and training courses. One of the standout musical scores for me is the hang gliding lessons. It perfectly evokes the feeling of gliding through pillowy clouds in the sky. There’s also a surprising amount of ambient detail in each lesson. The skydiving courses are a great example of this.

Fly me to the moon

You can hear the air rustling through your character’s clothes as your character plummets downward. The audio in that particular segment of the game nails the feeling of jumping out of a helicopter and plummeting earthward. That attention to detail is a nice touch that further cements this game’s place among the early greats in the Super NES library.

Overall, Pilotwings is a well-crafted game that showcased the new experiences possible on the Super NES. Far too often, simulation games of this era can be a hard sell to those who aren’t already familiar with said game. They are either too dull, too steep with the learning curve, too demanding with the controls, or a combination of these issues. But Pilotwings manages to avoid those pitfalls.

This game was a prime example of Nintendo putting its best foot forward and creating a unique, breezy game that no one else was doing back then. I highly recommend this one, especially if you saw it in passing back in the day but never played it. Switch owners can play Pilotwings as part of the Nintendo Classics available on the Nintendo Switch Online service. Happy soaring, and may the wind be always at your back.

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