Windjammers

About Windjammers

Windjammers (1994) is Data East's Neo Geo flying-disc game, played like Pong or air hockey, which became a cult favourite decades later, winning Giant Bomb's Old Game of the Year and a side tournament at EVO.

Windjammers in Depth

The mechanics are essentially those of Pong or air hockey: players hurl a flying disc at the opponent's goal zone, against the computer or another player. Six characters each have their own speed and power ratings and a special throw, and move freely in eight directions around their half of the court, defending their goal and attacking the other. The disc generally gets faster with every throw until someone scores, when the referee serves it to the player who conceded. Yellow goal zones are worth three points and red ones five, and letting a lobbed disc drop is a "Miss" worth two points to the opponent. Each of the six courts sizes and positions its goal zones differently.

On defence, players stop the disc by touching it, usually by diving with a button press because of its speed, and when it is knocked into the air, a target shows where it will land. On offence, a player cannot move with the disc and can hold it for only a few seconds, aiming with the joystick to throw straight at the goal or bank it off walls and barriers. Matches have three sets of 30 seconds by default, up to 99 in the arcade, won by reaching 12 points or leading when time runs out, with a sudden-death round if the first two sets are both tied.

Making Windjammers

Data East released Windjammers for the Neo Geo arcade system in 1994. RePlay listed it as North America's fourteenth most popular arcade game in April 1994, and Game Machine as Japan's twenty-second most successful table arcade unit in its 1 May 1994 issue, ahead of Samurai Shodown; the Neo Geo CD version sold 4,307 copies in its first week, according to Famitsu. It came to the Japanese Wii Virtual Console in 2010. Its reputation grew long after release: Giant Bomb gave it its "Old Game of the Year" award and made it a runner-up for 2017's, HobbyConsolas named it one of the twenty best Neo Geo AES games in 2014, and a growing competitive scene brought it to the Evolution Championship Series in Las Vegas as a side tournament in 2018. Dotemu released a port with online play for PlayStation 4 and Vita in August 2017 and Switch in 2018, then developed Windjammers 2, released in January 2022.