WeChat’s PENCIL PILOT, also known as Airplane War, and Fei Ji Da Zhan and 飞机大战 was a “tremendously successful” game.
“According to China Daily reports, there were more than 180 million “Airplane War” downloads within two hours of the title’s August 5 release.” — China Daily
And there was this pretty cool news headline one day:
“New WeChat ‘Airplane War’ game sending addicted players to hospital with severe ‘gamer’s thumb.'” — Qianjiang Evening News
And there was this terrific quote from the head of Tencent’s online group, essentially crediting the game with being one of the catalysts that launched WeChat toward being the biggest games platform in the world. Kinda neat.
“Tencent released a game called Pencil Pilot – now if you look at this game in isolation, it looks like a title taken from the home console market from years ago. However, it was tremendously successful for us. It drove a significant number of downloads for the Android version of WeChat and helped to establish Tencent as the biggest gaming company in China.” — Business Insider interview with Tencent SVP Sy Lau
Our tongue-in-cheek theme music and sound effects played up the nostalgia of old time video games that WeChat sought for this ridiculously popular and successful game that catapulted WeChat toward being a major gaming platform. Tencent’s WeChat messaging app now has about 700 million users (about double the U.S. population). For a while this little ditty was probably as well known as any tune in the world.
The game was discontinued about a year ago, but lives on in the hearts of a hundred million or so people, and on youtube.
