A helicopter game by Matt Wong

It died on a cracked CD.I brought it back to life.

Rotor City is the helicopter game I lost as a kid, and built again from scratch, thirty years later. Fourteen accurate helicopters, five living cities, and a job for every one of them. Fires, medevacs, people stuck on mountains, and an oil rig at night.

Buy Rotor City A$15

Buy on your phone, play on your computer. It runs in the browser on any Mac or PC. One file, nothing to install. The download link comes to your email.

The front seat

I caught the bug at five.

The first time I ever left the ground, I was four, in the front seat of a Bell 206 JetRanger. I was ruined for life.

Photo: me in the front seat of a 206
Matt aged four, sitting in the front seat of a Bell 206 JetRanger
Hamilton Island. Ruined for life.
The Jet Drover in Rotor City

That helicopter is in the game. It's called the Jet Drover.

The CD

Then a game came glued to a magazine.

I was a kid when I found SimCopter on a CD stuck to the front of a computer magazine. I installed it and couldn't believe how much fun it was. You flew a helicopter over a whole city. You put out fires. You picked people up and flew them places. Mostly you just flew.

Then the CD cracked.

I lost the install somewhere along the way. A new PC, probably. What I remember is years later, when I finally tracked down another copy. I put it in, and it wouldn't play.

Windows had moved on and the game hadn't. So it lived where dead things live, in my head, for a very long time.

The miracle

So I raised it from the dead.

I'm not a game developer. I farm, I run excavators, I write books and make videos. I built Rotor City with the help of AI, day after day, until it was right.

Everyone says AI makes a game in five minutes. Not true. Mine made tubes. My first helicopters looked like drainpipes with rotors on top. Getting them right took photo after photo, arguments about a "dolphin forehead" and a "Concorde nose", and a lot of patience. Over $1,500 of API tokens later, my dream was realised.

3 billiontokens of superintelligence work, start to finish
US$1,500+of compute
14helicopters rebuilt beside real photos and schematics
7attempts before even the smallest helicopter finally looked right
The Rook in Rotor City

The Rook, in the game.

Photo: me and the R44 on the farm
Matt standing in front of an R44 helicopter on his farm
The real one, on the farm, 2025.

I've flown whatever I could get my hands on since that first ride, fixed wing all the way up to jets. But helicopters came first, and this game is about them.

Matt as a teenager with a Cessna 152
Cessna 152
Matt with a Piper PA-28
Piper PA-28
Matt with a Cessna T182T
Cessna T182T
Matt standing beside a Cessna Citation II jet
Citation II
What came back

Everything I remembered, plus everything I wished it had.

Five cities

From a sleepy seaside town to a skyscraper metropolis. Each has its own districts, traffic, people and weather.

Fourteen helicopters

Start in a 1964 bubble trainer and work your way up to a fly-by-wire flagship. Each one flies and sounds like itself.

Real jobs

Fires, medevacs, hoist rescues, police pursuits, tours, sling loads. Some jobs need a different helicopter, so you head back to HQ and swap.

Out to sea, up the mountain

Land on an oil rig's helideck in the dark. Pull a skier off a slope. Drop supplies at a hut above the snowline.

Weather

Storms roll in with lightning and thunder. Morning fog you can climb out of. Snow settling on the valley.

Start her up

You arrive with the engine off. Hold to start it, listen to it wind up, and feel it lift off at full revs.

Build your base

HQ starts as a timber hangar and a painted pad. Every helicopter needs a bay, and the heavy ones need a pad that can take them. Build up, then watch it grow from the air. Swap helicopters and a little yellow tug tows the new one out.

Fuel that matters

Tanks are small and HQ is the only place to fill up. Dispatch calls BINGO when it's time to turn back. Run dry and the rotor keeps turning: glide down in autorotation, flare at the bottom, and a fuel truck comes out to you, for a price.

42 firsts, and a handbook

Your first night shift. A rig touchdown. A heli-ski drop. Each one pays a bonus once, with a word from Dispatch. Stuck? The Pilot's Handbook is 20 illustrated pages, one press of F1 away.

Lifting off from the HQ pad at golden hour
Approaching the oil platform at night, gas flare burning
Flying through a thunderstorm beside a skyscraper, lightning striking
Over the snowy ski runs of Pinewood Valley
A bucket drop on a forest fire
Hoisting a swimmer out of the sea by the island lighthouse
A yellow tug tows a helicopter out of its bay in the Emergency hangar at night
Elvis, the orange sky crane, on the HQ apron in front of the hangars
Looking out of a hangar bay at dawn, a helicopter with its blades folded
The hangar

You'll recognise them all.

Mayfly
1964 · trainer

Mayfly

All bubble and legs. It taught half the world to hover.

Rook
1992 · four seats

Rook

The first helicopter most private pilots ever own.

Wren
1982 · scout

Wren

The egg with a mean streak. Every action movie's favourite little bird.

Jet Drover
1967 · utility

Jet Drover

Every TV news station flew one in the eighties, and every cattle station after that.

Rook Turbine
2010 · turbine

Rook Turbine

The Rook, grown up. Tourists love it.

Wren Whisper
1991 · scout

Wren Whisper

No tail rotor, so suspects never hear it coming.

Chipmunk
1975 · utility

Chipmunk

Big body, slim tail. The champion of mountain work.

Mako
2024 · private

Mako

Sharp nose, shark fin, carbon everything. Blisteringly quick. British.

Marten
2014 · air ambulance

Marten

Clamshell doors, a hoist, and room for seven.

Big Hughie
1979 · medium twin

Big Hughie

The old warhorse grown up. Chop chop, Hughie.

Petrel
2001 · rescue

Petrel

The all-weather search-and-rescue workhorse.

Firekite
2019 · firefighter

Firekite

A battlefield legend retrained for bushfires.

Elvis
1962 · sky crane

Elvis

Ten thousand litres. Elvis arrives, and the fire leaves the building.

Resolute
2024 · flagship

Resolute

Fly-by-wire and sixteen seats. It does everything.

To be clear

What it isn't.

  • A flight simulator with three hundred switches. If you have a keyboard, you'll be flying in seconds.
  • A phone game. It needs a computer. Buy it on your phone and the link will be waiting in your email.
  • A subscription. No ads, no account, no internet needed once you have it. One file, yours to keep.
  • SimCopter. This is the game I wished SimCopter could still be, built new from the depths of my heart.
The price
A$15

Pay once and you get one file. Double-click it and it flies, on a Mac or a PC, with or without the internet.

Buy Rotor City A$15

Secure checkout by Stripe. Your download link arrives by email straight away.

Questions

Before you buy.

Does it work on a Mac?

Yes. It runs in Safari, Chrome, Edge or Firefox on any reasonably recent Mac or PC. Download it, double-click the file, and it opens in your browser.

Will my computer run it?

If it's from the last five years or so, almost certainly. The game checks how smoothly it's running and adjusts the graphics to suit.

Can I use a controller?

Yes. Plug in an Xbox or PlayStation controller and fly. The keyboard works too, and you can rebind every key.

Phones and tablets?

Not for now. It's built for a computer with a proper screen, and a phone can't open the download.

Is it hard?

No. It's a calm game. The helicopter hovers on its own when you let go, and nobody's shouting at you with a timer. Fuel is the one thing to keep an eye on, and the Pilot's Handbook is a key press away. You fly, you help people, you watch the sun go down.

Which browser is best?

Chrome or Edge, on a Mac or a PC: they load fastest and run smoothest. Safari works too. Firefox works, but it takes about a minute to load the first time, so if you have a choice, use Chrome or Edge.

What if it doesn't run for me?

Email me and I'll sort it out, or refund you.