El Airplane

El Airplane is a spoof of popular scrolling shooters. You pilot one of the strangest aircraft ever put into a shoot 'em up, although “flying chariot” may be a more accurate description.

Your goal is simple: survive each flight and reach the finish while destroying anything that gets in your way. Instead of relying only on ordinary bullets and missiles, your arsenal can include bananas, glass flasks, fish, boots, anvils and other increasingly ridiculous objects.

Across six episodes, the game throws an equally strange collection of enemies at you, mixing conventional flying threats with insects, monsters, dinosaurs and bizarre machines. Weapons and bonuses are scattered throughout each stage, gradually turning your ramshackle aircraft into an increasingly dangerous piece of cartoon nonsense.

At heart, El Airplane is a straightforward horizontal scrolling shooter, but nearly everything around that familiar structure is played for comedy.

The game was released in 2004 and published by Alawar Entertainment, which is why it is often remembered simply as an Alawar game. Its actual developer was a small independent studio called Ilgame, or IL Game, which maintained its own website by at least 2002. Very little information about the people behind the studio has survived, however, and over time the developer’s name became much less visible than Alawar’s.

Also made available here for preservation purposes only is a surviving beta version of El Airplane (as I was the beta tester). Early builds of small shareware games from this period are rarely preserved, making this version a unique little piece of the game’s history and a chance to see El Airplane before its final release.

Source: Itai’s Game Preservation Research