Star Raiders

The Good
Star Raiders burst onto the scene in 1982, and for this young eleven-year-old it was the answer to a dream. Fantastic sci-fi movies such as STAR WARS and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA had fired the imagination with vivid images of fighters blasting at one another in deep space, but until Star Raiders (and it's more primitive Activision counterpart StarMaster) space combat simulations were limited to glorified shooting galleries (STAR FIRE, TAIL GUNNER), 2-dimensional enemies-at-the-top-you-at-the-bottom games (GALAGA, PHOENIX), and games in which the user could shoot anything on screen, but the movement of the ship was as tightly controlled as a railroad engine (STAR WARS).

Into this morass came Star Raiders, which allowed for the first time a budding pilot to fly literally anywhere in the game universe. Further, it used a pseudo-3D flight model in which "Up", "Down", "Above", "Behind" all had meaning. In no other game at the time was it possible for one enemy fighter to distract you while another came up behind and blindsided you with a weapon. The feeling of freedom and of being in an honest-to-goodness spacecraft was unbelievable.

In addition, the game provided a number of other advanced features which would make it the most advanced space combat sim until the advent of ELITE in the late 80s/early nineties. Among them:

-- Individual ship components which could be damaged or destroyed. -- Control of multiple ship systems including shields, two computers, a sublight throttle and a hyperdrive. -- Tracking of ship movement within the local "sector" and in the larger "galaxy" in real-time. -- Strategic considerations, and the ability to destroy your own starbases to prevent the enemy gaining advantage from them. -- An advanced HUD indicating position of targets not in your immediate vicinity. -- "Guided" weapons (after a weapon was fired, moving the joystick would also change the course of the weapon, allowing one to "steer" it into distant targets). -- Different types of enemies with different capabilities and different attack profiles. -- Detailed energy management, each action having a corresponding cost in fuel, requiring careful management and planning. -- The presence of starbases (and utility tugs), which had to be defended and docked with.

All in all, an astonishing game, not only for the incredible level of detail and gameplay, but also that it was unequalled for nearly seven years.


The Bad
Even today, but especially for its time, it was a complex game. The Atari 5200 I played it on provided a 12-key phone touchpad with the joystick and Star Raiders used all 12 buttons, many of them mapped to more than one function. A failure of any of the keys meant that the game was unplayable. The interface was also somewhat difficult, as there were a number of things that had to be done very quickly on entering an enemy-occupied sector and all of it on the keypad.

It was also a game that could not be played without reading the instruction manual. This was the age before in-game tutorials; if you simply plugged it in and started flying, you would accomplish nothing and run out of gas. Even with the manual, some tasks such as docking with a starbase to replenish were non-trivial exercises that took practice to get right.

For an average person that had no interest in space, these difficulties may have made the game unplayable; for an eleven-year-old space enthusiast, they were nitpicks barely worthy of mention.


The Bottom Line
An excellent space-combat game -- still playable, even today.