Star Raiders
Star Raiders was a popular game for the Atari 8-bit family of computers, released in 1979. It was programmed by Doug Neubauer. It was distinctive for its graphics, which (under most conditions) represented an out-the-cockpit, first-person view from a fictional combat spaceship traveling through a streaming 3D starfield in pursuit of enemy fighters (called "Zylons" in game documentation). While there had already been simple target-shooting games using this perspective, Star Raiders had graphics of considerably higher quality and more complex game play, and inspired both imitators throughout the 1980s and later-generation "space combat simulation" games such as the Wing Commander and X-Wing series. It was arguably also a predecessor of first-person shooters. The game's attract mode screen of a simple streaming starfield was a common sight in computer stores of the early 1980s, used to show off the Atari computers' graphics capabilities.
Star Raiders was packaged in a ROM cartridge, which was the prevalent distribution medium for Atari 8-bit games of the time. The game used both a joystick for direct control and the computer keyboard for entering commands.
The game was later adapted to other Atari computer and game platforms.
Game play
Galactic Chart and hyperspace
The gameplay is built on earlier, mostly text-based Star Trek-themed computer games[1] in which the player's ship maneuvered about a two-dimensional grid fighting a fleet of enemy spaceships. In Star Raiders this part of the game took the form of a "Galactic Chart" display dividing the game's large-scale world into a grid of sectors, some of which were occupied by enemy ships or friendly "starbases". Flying about in the 3D view with the ship's normal engines was sufficient for travel within a sector; travel between sectors was via "hyperspace", accomplished through an elaborate and noisy "hyperwarp" sequence with graphics loosely reminiscent of the Star Wars and Star Trek films in which the stars seemed to stretch to radial lines. On the higher difficulty levels, hyperwarp had a skill element; the player had to keep a wandering crosshair roughly centered during the sequence in order to land in the right place.
Combat, damage and resources
To the Star Trek formula, the game added real-time 3D space battles. In the main, first-person-perspective display, the player could look out the front or rear of the ship and shoot shimmering fireballs at Zylon ships, which came in three different varieties vaguely reminiscent of ships from Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica (whose villains were called Cylons). A small targeting display in the lower right corner indicated when weapons were locked on the enemy. There was also a "long-range scan" screen showing the surrounding region in a third-person plan view.
Enemies would fire back, and would cause damage if the player's ship was hit. The ship could also be damaged by collision with occasional meteoroids. Instead of the multiple lives that were and are a common video-game convention, the Star Raiders ship had only one life, but would be completely destroyed only if hit while its energy shields were lowered or out of order; otherwise it would sustain varying types of damage, which caused shields, engines, weapons or information displays to work intermittently, partially or not at all. The player had to manage finite energy reserves as well as damage to the ship; it could be repaired and restocked by rendezvous with a starbase. The enemy would also destroy a starbase if allowed to surround its Galactic Chart sector for too long, so the starbases had to be defended. All this lent Star Raiders a degree of complexity and a sense of player immersion that was rare in action games of the era.
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Two Zylon fighters attack.
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Viewing the Galactic Chart.
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Travelling to another sector, via 'hyperspace.'
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Docking with a friendly starbase for repairs.
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Viewing the sector using the Long-Range Sector Scanner.
Scoring
Also unusually for the era, the player could actually win the game, which was accomplished by destroying all enemy ships in the galaxy. There was no running score display; only upon winning, dying or quitting the game would the player receive a "rating", which was a quasi-military rank accompanied by a numerical class (particularly bad play earned a rank of "Garbage Scow Captain" or "Galactic Cook"). The rating depended on a formula involving enemy destroyed, energy and time used, and starbases destroyed.
Technical Details
Star Raiders used many techniques that would become common features of Atari 8-bit game programming in the 1980s. The starfield was drawn in a graphics mode that (at full screen coverage) provided 160x96 bitmapped pixels with a palette of four colors. The use of a palette meant that color changes associated with the presence or absence of energy shields, emergency alarms, and the screen flash representing destruction of the ship could be accomplished by simply changing the palette values. Enemy ships, shots, and so forth used Atari's variant of hardware sprites, known as player-missile graphics. The Atari 8-bit family allowed different graphics modes and color palettes to be used in different horizontal bands on the screen, by using a simple display list and a type of horizontal blank interrupt. While other games made more extensive use of these techniques, Star Raiders used them in a relatively simple fashion to combine text displays and graphics; the cockpit display used a custom character set to display futuristic-looking characters and symbols reminiscent of MICR.
Star Raiders' sounds of engines, shots, explosions, alarms, etc. were synthesized directly using the Atari POKEY sound chip's capabilities (author Doug Neubauer had been involved in the design of POKEY).
The entire game, code and data, fit into 8K (8192 bytes) of ROM, and required only 8K or RAM for its working data and display visuals; thus it could run on any Atari 8-bit computer.
The debris particles emitted when an enemy ship was destroyed were actually calculated as 3D points. Since the 6502 did not have a native multiply or divide command, the game would slow down when several of these particles were active.
Adaptations, Sequels, and Tie-Ins
Versions of Star Raiders were created for the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, and the Atari ST series of computers. Of these, the best-known is probably the Atari 2600 version (1982), which shipped with a special touchpad controller to take the place of the computer keyboard; it suffered somewhat from the 2600's relatively limited capabilities. The Atari 5200 version is nearly identical to the computer version, but takes advantage of the 5200's analog controller and makes some minor graphical changes.
Atari also produced a somewhat less successful sequel titled Star Raiders II. Star Raiders II was originally The Last Starfighter, a licensed tie-in for the movie The Last Starfighter, written for the 8-bit Atari line. When that licensing deal fell through, the completed game was modified into Star Raiders II. It was then ported to the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, and ZX Spectrum.
An updated version of Star Raiders, to be known as Star Raiders 2000, was planned for release on the Atari Jaguar in 1995. It was never released, and no known prototypes exist.
Neubauer's later game Solaris had some elements in common with Star Raiders. Surprisingly, Solaris on the Atari 2600 was more visually advanced than the original Atari 800 version of Star Raiders. Atari returned to 3D first-person space combat in a far more graphically elaborate form, though with more simplistic gameplay, with its licensed Star Wars arcade game.
Several of Atari's competitors produced Star Raiders-like games in the early 1980s, usually for platforms on which Star Raiders did not run (and for the 2600 before Atari ported Star Raiders there). Activision's Starmaster (1982) was the most popular.
In 1983 DC Comics published a graphic novel inspired by the game. It was written by Elliot S! Maggin and illustrated by José Luis García Lopez.
External links
- Maury Markowitz's Star Raiders page with screenshots, technical details, extensive gameplay description, and pictures of Star Raiders successors
- The Star Raiders Tribute Page with screenshots, audio samples, animations and the game manual
- Interview with creator Doug Neubauer includes snippet of Star Raiders source code
- Another interview with Doug Neubauer
- Atari 2600 Star Raiders
- Digital Press Easter egg entry for Atari 2600 Star Raiders
- Digital Press Easter egg entry for Atari 5200/8-bit Star Raiders
- Star Raiders Manual - Atari 2600 Atari Age reprint
- Star Raiders Tutorial Reprint of Sept 1982 article from Byte Magazine
- videogamecritic.net Atari 5200 Star Raiders Tactics
- "Star Raiders Academy" from July 1983 Antic Magazine