 Star Raiders manual cover 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. Download high resolution version (800x1050, 109 KB)Manual cover to the 1979 Atari video game Star Raiders for the Atari 8-bit computer. ...
Download high resolution version (800x1050, 109 KB)Manual cover to the 1979 Atari video game Star Raiders for the Atari 8-bit computer. ...
For the list, see list of computer and video games. ...
Atari built a series of 8-bit home computers based on the MOS Technology 6502 CPU, starting in 1979. ...
This page refers to the year 1979. ...
John Carmack, one of the worlds leading game programmers, working on Doom 3 using an IDE. Game programming, a subset of game development, is the programming of computer, console or arcade games. ...
Computer graphics (CG) is the field of visual computing, where one utilizes computers both to generate visual images synthetically and to integrate or alter visual and spatial information sampled from the real world. ...
Cockpit of a light aircraft, showing instrumentation dials and dual control yokes. ...
This article is about the class of fictional vehicles. ...
The 1980s decade refers to the years from 1980 to 1989, inclusive. ...
Wing Commander is a series of space combat simulation computer games from Origin Systems, Inc. ...
The X-Wing computer game series is a series of space simulation computer games set in the Star Wars universe that attempts to, faithfully to the movies, simulate the fictional experience of starfighter combat. ...
Doom, one of the games that defined the first-person shooter genre. ...
An arcade games attract mode is the display it shows when nobody is playing the game. ...
 A Star Raiders ROM cartridge for the Atari 8-bit computers; early releases had a typo on the label ("Star Raider"), as shown above 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. A ROM cartridge of the 1979 Atari game Star Raiders for the Atari 8-bit line of computers. ...
A ROM cartridge of the 1979 Atari game Star Raiders for the Atari 8-bit line of computers. ...
Read-only memory (ROM) is used as a storage medium in computers. ...
For other uses, see Joystick (disambiguation). ...
A computer keyboard is a peripheral modeled after the typewriter keyboard. ...
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. Star Trek collectively refers to a science-fiction franchise spanning six unique television series, 726 episodes and ten motion pictures in addition to hundreds of novels, video games, fan stories and other works of fiction all set within the same fictional universe created by Gene Roddenberry in the mid-1960s. ...
A starbase is usually portrayed as a facility strategically positioned in space used to repair and re-supply starships. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
The cover of the 2004 DVD widescreen release of the modified original Star Wars Trilogy. ...
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. Battlestar Galactica is an American science fiction movie and television series, produced in 1978 by Glen Larson and starring Lorne Greene, Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict. ...
Old Cylon Centurion shown in a museum display in the 2003 Battlestar Galactica miniseries The Cylons are a cybernetic civilization at war with the twelve colonies of humanity in the science fiction movie and television series Battlestar Galactica, in the original 1978/1980 series as well as the movie and...
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. A meteoroid is a relatively small (sand- to boulder-sized) fragment of debris in the Solar System. ...
Two Zylon fighters attack. The 1979 Atari 8-bit computer game Star Raiders. ...
| Viewing the Galactic Chart. The 1979 Atari 8-bit computer game Star Raiders. ...
| Travelling to another sector, via 'hyperspace.' The 1979 Atari 8-bit computer game Star Raiders. ...
| Docking with a friendly starbase for repairs. The 1979 Atari 8-bit computer game Star Raiders. ...
| Viewing the sector using the Long-Range Sector Scanner. The 1979 Atari 8-bit computer game Star Raiders. ...
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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. Military rank, or simply rank, is a system of grading seniority and command within military organizations. ...
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. Suppose the smiley face in the top left corner is an RGB bitmap image. ...
A pixel (pix, 1932 abbreviation of pictures, coined by Variety headline writers + element) is one of the many tiny dots that make up the representation of a picture in a computers memory. ...
An artists palette A palette is: A thin board that a painter holds and mixes colour pigments on. ...
In computer graphics, a sprite is a two-dimensional image or animation that is integrated into a larger scene. ...
Display list - a group of GL (graphics language, e. ...
A horizontal blank interrupt is a programming technique used in some systems, notably video games and consoles, to allow program code to be run in the periods when the display hardware is turned off, waiting for the TV to complete its horizontal blank, which takes about 10 uS. The technique...
A character encoding is a code that pairs a set of characters (such as an alphabet or syllabary) with a set of something else, such as numbers or electrical pulses. ...
Magnetic Ink Character Recognition, or MICR, is a special kind of optical character recognition technology that was adopted mainly by the U.S. banking industry to facilitate the processing of checks. ...
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). A classic FM synthesizer, the Yamaha DX7. ...
Atari POKEY (C012294) pin-out The Atari POKEY is a digital I/O chip found in the Atari 8-bit family of home computers and many arcade games in the 1980s. ...
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. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed by MOS Technology in 1975. ...
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. The Atari 2600, released in 1977, is the first successful video game console to use plug-in cartridges instead of having one or more games built in. ...
The Atari 5200 is a video game console introduced in 1982 by Atari. ...
The Atari 520ST Atari 1040STF with SC1224 color monitor The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was commercially popular from 1985 to the early 1990s. ...
1982 (MCMLXXXII) is a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
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. The Last Starfighter is a 1984 science fiction movie or its subsequent novelization that year by Alan Dean Foster, or a video game based on the movie. ...
For the hip hop group, see Commodore 64 (band). ...
Amstrad CPC 464, with CTM644 colour monitor The Amstrad CPC was an 8-bit home computer produced by Amstrad in the 1980s. ...
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum was a home computer released in the United Kingdom in 1982 by Sinclair Research. ...
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. The Atari Jaguar is a video game console introduced in November 1993 as a powerful next generation platform. ...
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. Screenshot of the title screen. ...
Star Wars is an arcade game produced by Atari and released in 1983. ...
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. Activision, Inc. ...
Starmaster is a title produced for the Atari 2600 video game console. ...
1982 (MCMLXXXII) is a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
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. 1983 (MCMLXXXIII) is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
The current DC Comics logo, adopted in May 2005. ...
A graphic novel (GN) is a long-form comic book, usually with lengthy and complex storylines, and often aimed at more mature audiences. ...
Elliot S! Maggin is an American writer. ...
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