Star Raiders

Star Raiders is a space combat simulator video game that was written by Doug Neubauer and published in 1980 by Atari, Inc. for the Atari 400/800 computers. The player assumes the role of a starship pilot who is fighting Zylon forces while managing their ship's energy and systems, and protecting friendly starbases. Starflight and combat are shown in the 3D cockpit view with a 2D galactic map showing the status of the Zylon invasion. The television series Battlestar Galactica, the film Star Wars (1977), and the 1971 mainframe game Star Trek influenced Neubauer, who began developing Star Raiders in his non-working time at Atari. Matt Barton and Bill Loguidice of Gamasutra called Star Raiders one of the best-known games for Atari's 400 and 800 computers.

This article is about the original game. For the remake, see Star Raiders (2011 video game).
Star Raiders
Atari 400/800 cover art
Developer(s)Atari, Inc.
Publisher(s)Atari, Inc.
Programmer(s)Doug Neubauer
Platform(s)Atari 8-bit, Atari 2600, Atari 5200, Atari ST
Release
March 1980
  • Atari 400/800
  • March 1980
  • Atari 2600
  • September 1982
  • Atari 5200
  • January 1983
Genre(s)Space combat simulator[1]
Mode(s)Single-player

Star Raiders was later ported to the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, and Atari ST. It influenced space combat games such as Elite (1984) and Wing Commander (1990), a sequel named Star Raiders II, and a 2011 remake. Star Raiders was included in a list of ten games that were submitted as a game canon to the Library of Congress in 2007.

Plot and gameplay

Star Raiders is set in outer space. The player assumes the role of the captain of Elite Atarian Starship fleet. A treaty between the Atarian Federation and the Zylon Empire is broken, leading to a war; the player must combat the Zylons before they eliminate humanity.[2] The player must destroy the Zylon ships before they destroy the player's ship or the player's ship runs out of energy.[3][4] The game is controlled using both a keyboard and a joystick.[3][5] The game is primarily experienced from a first-person, 3D cockpit view and larger, 2D map overviews for long-distance travel.[6] The player can control the speed of travel in space, and the angle of display (rear and front-views), and engage a mini-display called the Attack Computer Display that displays the horizontal and vertical coordinates of attacking Zylon ships and other targets. During battle, the player can destroy enemy ships using a photon torpedo; they must also avoid or destroy asteroids, which can cause damage or destroy their starship.[5] In this mode, the bottom of the screen shows a control-panel display showing velocity (V), the number of enemies that have been destroyed (K), the ship's remaining energy {E) and the amount of targets in the area (T).[7] Firing photon torpedoes, using shields, and traversing space deplete energy. To restore energy or damaged ship parts, the player must orbit a friendly starbase and match its coordinates with the Attack Computer Display.[8]

A long-range scanner changes the game's display, allowing the player a top-down view of their ship and flashing squares indicate targets' locations. When the long-range scan is damaged, the player will see the objects in the area and false reflections of them.[4] The player can also view a galactic chart, which shows a grid map displayed that indicates friendly starbases, enemy ships and the player's location. Players can navigate to different areas on the map and hyper- warp there.[5] The status of the equipment is displayed in the galactic chart at the PESCLR text (for photons torpedoes, engines, sheilds, computer, long-range scan and sub-space radio). These elements can be damaged or destroyed and will effect gameplay; the destruction of engines will cause slower travel.[7] A subspace radio delivers messages through the galactic chart such as whether star bases are surrounded or destroyed.[4]

Star Raiders' skill levels are Novice, Pilot, Warrior, and Commander.[9] On high-difficulty levels, during hyperwarp moments, players must manually navigate their ship using crosshairs while warping.[10] Zylon ships move slightly more quickly and have fewer random intervals in their attack algorithm that governs the way they travel to attack star bases.[11]

Development
Colored dice with white background
Atari 400
Atari 800
Atari 800
Star Raiders was first developed to be played on both the Atari 400 and 800 line of 8-bit computers.

Star Raiders is Doug Neubauer's first-published video game; he has a background in electrical engineering rather than game design.[12] While working at National Semiconductor, as programming experiments, Neubauer created demo scenes with star backgrounds.[13] National canceled its home-computer projects and many employees, including Neubauer, moved to Atari,[6] where its head of dedicated-game-console department Richard Simone hired him. Neubauer became a key figure in the development of the POKEY sound chip, which is used in the Atari 400 and 800 computers.[12] Neubauer used the 17-bit noise-and-random-number generator he developed for the chip to create sound effects for Star Raiders, such as the rocket engine and explosion sounds.[6] He tried to recreate the sounds of photon torpedoes from the 1960s television series Star Trek.[14]

During a period of downtime of his hardware design duties, Neubauer worked under the supervision of Jay Miner who allowed Neubauer to create software which led to early development of Star Raiders. He stated he "just did [Star Raiders] for fun" and that "Atari was pretty laid back [...] I think Star Raiders, along with other early games, helped in finding any bugs in the Atari 400/800 chips".[15][14] Neubauer began developing the game in early 1979.[16] It was in development for about eight to ten months.[17]

The text-based game Star Trek (1971) that was available on mainframe computers in the 1970s inspired Neubauer; he said he never played the game but heard other programmers describing it and felt "the game just didn't look that interesting to play, but it looked like a good idea for a galactic chart".[15] Neubauer wanted to create something that resembled 3D space combat for the system, and was inspired by science-fiction films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), THX 1138 (1971) and Star Wars (1977). He also cited the television series Battlestar Galactica (1978) as influences, specifically for the name of the Zylon enemies. Other game visuals such as the 3D cockpit point of view and the hyper warp were influenced by Star Trek and Star Wars.[15]

Neubauer asked fellow employees if they had algorithms for 3D motion, which nobody did, leading to him "wasting a few weeks" trying to figure out the equations without using sine and cosine, which he achieved using pen and paper. After figuring out an algorithm for 3D motion, Neubauer said creating a star field and explosions for the game was "pretty simple", and described his code for it as "crummy 16-bit multiplier code" that slowed down the game during the explosions. Neubauer also said he did not know how to use the graphics capabilities of the Atari 800 computer, which led to two enemies being on the screen at the same time. Initially, Neubauer developed the hyper warp to be more complicated, involve the player making calculations to make the jump as in Isaac Asimov's The Stars, Like Dust (1951). He later said; "it didn't take too long to realize that it was a dumb idea in terms of gameplay for an action videogame".[18] The way enemies attacked star bases was also changed during development because Neubauer's algorithm would sometimes make them adhere to the map while approaching star bases. This led him to add random variations to their paths to stop them adhering to the map. A feature that would allow the player to fly the ship into star bases for docking was abandoned because it was not possible due to a limited number of bytes in the ROM cartridge.[18]

At the end of Star Raiders, the player is ranked using humorous titles such as "Galactic Cook", "Garbage Scow Captain" and "Star Commander (Class 1)". Neubauer did not want a number-score system and instead applied a military ranking with humorous ratings to poorly performing players.[11] When Neubauer finished the first draft of the game, he was 900 bytes over the eight kilobyte limit. One week before the game was to be ported to ROM cartridges, Neubauer was adjusting the difficulty of the game to earn certain rankings.[13] He stated the game had "a lot of ugly spaghetti code" so Star Raiders could run on less-expensive Atari 400 computers and fit on an eight-kilobyte cartridge. [11]

Release
The Atari 2600 version shipped with the Video Touch Pad controller.[19]

Star Raiders was released in March 1980.[20] Neubauer was not directly involved in the creation of either the Atari 2600 or Atari ST versions of Star Raiders.[21] The Atari 2600 version of the game was released in September 1982.[19][22] The Atari 2600 release included an eight-button touch pad and a DC Comics book.[23]

The Atari 5200 version of the game was released in January 1983.[24] This version of the game was the first game to make use of all 12 buttons on the system's gamepad.[25] The Atari 2600 version of the game was re-released in various compilation formats, such as the Atari 80 in One for Windows in 2003 and the Atari Anthology for PlayStation 2 and Xbox in 2004.[26] The Atari 5200 version was included as part of the Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration (2022) compilation for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Steam, and Xbox One.[27] This port of the game included additional content such as overlays that show player status and rumble effects when entering hyperspace.[28]

Reception

By October 1982, the Atari 2600 port of Star Raiders was among the sixth-best-selling console releases and continued to be a top-ten release in November.[29][30]

Contemporaneous

Joretta Klepfer of Compute! said the game is "incredibly exciting to play and just about as much fun to watch", praising the 3D effects of the gameplay, and the use of color and sound.[31] Klepfer noted the game is not intuitive and requires players to read the manual before playing.[31] David C. Cole of InfoWorld said the game is "graphically rich" and noted its addictive qualities, allowing two children to play it for a few minutes that "turned into six hours!"[32] Cole noted difficulty in the game, stating in more-difficult modes if the ship is damaged it is nearly impossible to locate a base for repairs.[33] In the January 1982 issue of Softline, a reviewer noted how different the game is to other contemporaneous Atari computer games, stating among the few games made for the system, they were usually just bigger or brighter versions of games made for the Atari 2600 with the exception of Star Raiders.[34] The review concluded; "the game stands repeat play well and remains quite difficult".[9] Henry Allen echoed the praise in The Washington Post, saying Star Raiders is like "the best possible combination of a shooting gallery and a planetarium", and that in comparison to popular contemporaneous arcade games, is "the harder stuff", referring to the games complexity.[35]

Greg Williams of Byte said in 1981; "no one – I repeat, no one – has created either a home-computer game or a coin-operated video game that is better than Star Raiders"."[36] The review praised the games color, sound and controls while stating "the feature that gives it life is its real-time animation", noting its three-dimensional star field and hyper-space movement.[36][37] Williams concluded; "to all software vendors, this is the game you have to surpass to get our attention".[37] In Electronic Games, Bill Kunkel and Frank Laney found the game similar to previous Star Trek-styled games but said; "it is far superior to all past efforts in this field" and is the game that "best demonstrates the outstanding videogame and computer capabilities of 6502-based machines".[38] In the March 1983 issue of Softline, the results of a readers poll of the best programs for Atari computers ranked Star Raiders number one on the list with 45% more ballots than the second-place contender Jawbreaker (1981).[39]

From contemporaneous reviews of the game's ports, The Video Game Update said the Atari 2600 version was unable to duplicate the quality of the home-computer releases but said the version "has done a very good job of transitions" and that the game had become "a classic space game".[19] According to Tim Onosko of The Capital Times, the Atari 2600 version is poorly made with inadequate graphics, stating Activisions Starmaster is superior.[40] The Video Game Update later reviewed the Atari 5200 version of Star Raiders, finding it to be essentially the same as the original home-computer game, and calling it an "extremely complicated game" that is also "extremely sophisticated" and "unquestionably one of the best space games in existence. No fan of first-person space games should be without this one."[25] Jack Schofield of The Guardian gave a negative review to the Atari ST version, stating the improved graphics do not make Star Raiders a better game and that the original is "still a brilliant game."[41]

Retrospective

Star Raiders was included in GameSpot's series "The Great Games of All Time"; writer Jeff Gerstmann stated the game has a level of complexity that is usually only found within text adventures of the era and that it launched the space simulation genre.[42] In 1995, Flux magazine ranked the original computer version of Star Raiders 46th on its list of "Top 100 Video Games".[43]

From retrospective reviews of the game ports, Mike Bevan of Retro Gamer referred to the Atari 2600 version as a "rather weak port" with a smaller galactic chart. The game was more expensive than the average Atari 2600 game because it included a touch-screen pad controller.[10] Jeff Gerstmann of GameSpot stated the Atari 2600 version "was pretty good on its own, but one look at the Atari 400/800 version of the game was all it took to sour someone on the Atari 2600 version forever".[42] A 16-bit version of Star Raiders was released for the Atari ST computers; according to Bevan, the controls feel "floaty", the graphics are not very good, and the game runs more slowly than the original.[10]

In 2007, Henry Lowood, the curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, created a project to preserve video games. Lolwood submitted a list of games to the Library of Congress through a committee that included himself, game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky, Matteo Bittanti, and Joystiq journalist Christopher Grant. Star Raiders was included in their initial game canon of ten submitted video games.[44]

Legacy

Matt Barton and Bill Loguidice of Gamasutra stated Star Raiders prompted several clones following its release.[45] These included console games like Space Attack, Starmaster for Atari 2600 and Space Spartans (1982) for the Intellivision, and Sentinel and Codename MAT for the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, respectively.[10][45] Schofield stated in 1986 Codename Mat and Sentinel were the better attempts.[41] According to Barton and Loguidice, Star Raiders established many conventions that would be part of the space-simulation-game genre that would rise with later games such as Elite (1984) and Wing Commander (1990).[46]

Barton and Loguidice described Star Raiders is one of the best-known games for Atari's 400 and 800 computers. Neubauer made no profit from the game because Atari did not grant royalties to its developers. Neubauer left the company but later did contract work for it.[46] The game remained popular throughout the 1980s; when in 1987 the magazine The Computer Entertainer polled its readers on their all time-favorite computer and video games. Star Raiders was placed 14th.[47] The popularity of Star Raiders had negative side effects for the Atari home-computer line, which was intended to seriously compete with other home computers and not to be considered a game machine like the Atari 2600.[20] When asked about the popularity of the game in 1986, Neubauer said: "It's pretty amazing, the way the game caught on. I think it was the first game to combine action with a strategy screen, and, luckily, the concept worked out pretty well."[13] Neubauer also said the game "looks pretty primitive" by 1986 standards.[13]

Follow-ups

Atari later released Star Raiders II for several systems without Neubauer's input because he was no longer working at Atari as a full-time employee.[10] Bevan wrote in Retro Gamer fans of Star Raiders sometimes considered Neubauer's 1986 Atari 2600 game Solaris to be the "true successor" to the original game.[15] Neubauer said Solaris was not a sequel, and that he was fonder of Star Raiders, which he said has better gameplay, that he preferred that game's explosion graphics and cockpit view.[15]

A new version of Star Raiders was announced in 2010 and was developed by California-based Incinerator Studios.[48][49] On the game's release in 2011, it received "generally unfavorable reviews" according to Metacritic.[50] Carolyn Petit of GameSpot compared the new version of game to the original, stating the original game is complex and ambitious with a sense of humor while the new version "possesses none of the ambition or fun of its namesake".[49]

See also

References
  1. Scoleri III.
  2. Atari 1980, p. 2.
  3. Atari 1980, p. 3.
  4. Atari 1980, p. 6.
  5. Atari 1980, p. 4.
  6. Fleming 2007, p. 1.
  7. Atari 1980, p. 5.
  8. Atari 1980, p. 7.
  9. "Softline Gameline Reviews". Softline. Vol. 1, no. 3. January 1982. p. 32.
  10. Bevan, p. 66.
  11. Bevan, p. 67.
  12. Bevan, p. 64.
  13. Pappas 1986, p. 90.
  14. Fleming 2007b.
  15. Bevan, p. 65.
  16. Pappas 1986, p. 89.
  17. Tomczyk 1980, p. 75.
  18. Bevan, pp. 67–68.
  19. "Critically Speaking... Atari-Compatible". The Video Game Update. Vol. 1, no. 7. October 1982.
  20. Fulton 2008.
  21. Barton & Loguidice 2009a, p. 1.
  22. "Availability Update". The Video Game Update. Vol. 1, no. 6. September 1982.
  23. Weiss 2007, p. 112.
  24. "The Year in Review". The Video Game Update. Vol. 2, no. 10. January 1984.
  25. "Atari 5200-Compatible". The Video Game Update. Vol. 1, no. 10. January 1983.
  26. Harris 2004.
  27. Machkovech 2022.
  28. Musgrave 2022.
  29. "Video Take-Out's Top 10 Sellers". The Video Game Update. Vol. 1, no. 7. October 1982.
  30. "Video Take-Out's Top 10 Sellers". The Video Game Update. Vol. 1, no. 8. November 1982.
  31. Kelpfer 1980, p. 74-75.
  32. Cole 1980, p. 13.
  33. Cole 1980, p. 27.
  34. "Softline Gameline Reviews". Softline. Vol. 1, no. 3. January 1982. p. 16.
  35. Allen 1980.
  36. Williams 1981, p. 106.
  37. Williams 1981, p. 108.
  38. Kunkel & Laney 1981.
  39. "The Most Popular Atari Program Ever". Softline. Vol. 2. March 1983. pp. 44–45.
  40. Onosko 1982.
  41. Schofield 1986.
  42. Gerstmann.
  43. Amrich et al. 1995, p. 30.
  44. Chaplin 2007.
  45. Barton & Loguidice 2009a.
  46. Barton & Loguidice 2009, p. 2.
  47. "The Computer Entertainer Readers' Hall of Fame Awards". Computer Entertainer. April 1988. p. 3.
  48. Thorsen 2010.
  49. Petit 2011.
  50. "Star Raiders". Metacritic. Fandom, Inc. Retrieved July 11, 2023.

Sources
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