Time Pilot

Time Pilot is Konami's time-travelling dogfighter: a free-scrolling sky where you fly in any direction through five eras - 1910 biplanes, 1940 WWII fighters, 1970 jets, 1982 helicopters, and finally 2001 UFOs - and the era changes when you shoot down enough of the current wave's formations.

It looks like a simple 360-degree shooter, but the design has one genuinely elegant idea: parachuting pilots. Every downed aircraft drops a parachutist, and shooting the parachute is worth bonus points - or you can let him drift, because the screen slowly fills with them and they do nothing to you. It is a pure greed mechanic decades before the term. Your own bomb clears the screen of bullets and planes, and the era bosses (a giant mothership per era) anchor each section. Konami released it in 1982, the same year as many fixed-screen shooters, and the freedom of the open sky was a real statement: this is one of the games that made the scrolling shooter genre possible.

• ▸Five eras from biplanes to UFOs, unlocked by clearing formation kills
• ▸The parachutist greed mechanic - shoot the parachute for points
• ▸A screen-clearing bomb as a genuine panic resource
• ▸Full 360-degree flight on open, non-scrolling arenas