Barnstorming was designed by Steve Cartwright and first published by Activision in 1982. Like most people who play it for the first time, I had to check if I was playing the game as intended, because there’s so little to it.

You fly a biplane, on a scrolling screen, which must avoid obstacles (birds and windmills), and fly through a series of barns in the quickest time possible. There are four courses in total, three on increasingly-longer courses that stay the same, and can therefore be memorised. The fourth (and longest) course is random, and requires the highest number of barns be flown-through.

After take-off, you can hold down the fire button to get a boost in speed, but must also be careful not to use this booster to crash into things. The game manual says that it is possible to make it through these courses at full speed, but in practise that is not an easy task.

When the plane hits a bird, or windmill (or anything else that it can’t pass through), it bounces backwards and loses momentum for a second or two, before flying on. Which is funny in itself (that video games can so readily ignore the laws of physics if they want to). Not so funny, however, is that that is pretty much all there is to Barnstorming. Aside from figuring out that moving vertically will lose you time too. So the aim is to reach the finish line with as little movement as possible, and also with optimal use of the boost button*.

As I said above: I had to go check (by reading the manual and watching a couple of longplays), that I wasn’t missing anything, and it doesn’t look like I was. The box art for Barnstorming goes out of its way to show the biplane looping (with an Activision rainbow loop trail), but that just seems deceptive to me. There is no looping in this game.

Personally, Barnstorming is not my cup of tea, but it’s nicely presented and is playable, and I can at least see the appeal of it to race game fans.

*= Barnstorming was inadvertently embroiled in the alleged cheating scandal at Twin Galaxies (which used to be the de-facto organisation keeping historical high scores and gaming world records), when a time of “32.04” was posted by a guy called Todd Rogers. Fans of the game doubted this was even possible, without using a hack, and this has since been proven beyond doubt. Since then, all of Todd Rogers‘ historical high scores have been doubted as “impossible“, a contributing factor to the downfall of the validity of historical video game high scores.

More: Barnstorming on Wikipedia