Pretty close. The game was called FlightDeck and the publisher was Aackosoft. It was a bit earlier though, 1980s, I'm a bit hazy on the exact date but it would have to be somewhere around 1988 or so.
Here are some shots from the MSX version (which was made a few years earlier by an absolutely awesome programmer called Steve Course).
Spaceship Warlock! Thank you for reminding me of this title. Sometimes I think about it but couldn’t remember the name.
It’s hard to explain today why it felt so advanced in 1991. The fact that it ran from CD on the expensive, exotic Macintosh II while other games were low-res and loaded from floppies on MS-DOS or Amiga was a big factor.
I'm pretty sure this is quite old. I remember the exact same graphics from something I played with at least 12 years ago (I think it might have actually been in like 2001 or 2002, but my memory is vague).
This reminds me of a couple of games I had on the Commodore-64. One had a helicopter, but the other was Lunar Lander, which has a very similar mechanic.
I can recall a few others with similar play style - Star paws and Zaxxon come to mind.
I can remember playing this in the 80s as well. They had some classic names back then, all Zs and Xs. Got on a freighter ship in China as a teenager in 1991, and the lone arcade machine was Xevious.
Some gameplay footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiO6XYt8M14&list=PL192CF249E...
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