Shields up for safety!

The success of Star Raiders meant that Atari wanted the game on its other major platform, the Atari 2600. A version was eventually released for the 2600, complete with a keypad controller that let you have similar access to ship systems and other functions that were standard on the 400/800. The Atari 2600 version of the game 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.

The galactic chart lets you look at the big picture so that you can decide where to go next.

Today, the space simulation genre is a robust set of games with some pretty firm--though also fairly high--standards. Games like TIE Fighter, Freespace 2, and the Wing Commander series are testaments to both the genre's popularity as well as its long-running nature. But the genre wasn't always so grounded. One of the early classics that set the tone for the space sim genre is Atari's Star Raiders. The game, programmed on the side by an Atari chip design engineer named Doug Neubauer, was the very first game programmed for the Atari 400/800 series of home computers. It was also one of the first games to tackle the space simulation genre.

The premise in Star Raiders is simple. The galaxy is filled with enemy ships, and it's up to you to wipe them out before they can destroy you and your starbases. The enemy attempts to surround your starbases before destroying them, so you need to warp from quadrant to quadrant to take out groups of enemy ships before they can move on your people. Once all the enemy ships are history, the game ends, and you're given a ranking based on how efficiently you eliminated your foes.

There's a level of complexity to Star Raiders that wasn't really found outside of text adventures back then. Not only did you have the action-oriented dogfighting-style combat but also you had to worry about your ship's systems. You could toggle your shields, targeting computer, and other devices on and off. When fighting, of course, you'd want all of these systems on. However, you could conserve your ship's energy by turning some things off. You also had an aft view, which let you take on enemies that attempted to creep up from behind you. And your galactic chart gave you a bird's-eye view of enemy movements around the entire gameworld. If the combat got too heavy, you could always fly back to a starbase to recharge and repair your damaged or destroyed systems.

Ship damage was another cool feature. Damaged equipment would sort of work. Your shields would flicker, your targeting computer might not be so accurate, and so on. Destroyed systems, of course, were a very bad thing...especially if that destroyed system was your shields system.

Graphically, Star Raiders was pretty great--for its day. Sure, the game slowed down whenever you blew up an enemy ship. And sure, most of the enemy ships simply looked like TIE Fighters. But the game handled a fully 3D world pretty well.

Star Raiders was the game that launched a thousand ships. Without it, we might not be so keen on the space simulation genre today.

Back in the late '70s and early '80s, games really weren't very complex. Unless you wanted to play a text adventure, you were usually limited to arcade-style games that took place on one screen. Star Raiders, by comparison, was totally epic. Aside from just the regular space combat that might have been occurring in your vicinity, you also had to think about other enemy ships in other quadrants, which constantly worked to surround your starbases so that they could be destroyed. This gave my young mind a lot to think about back then... I don't think I ever got a ranking higher than garbage scow captain on the commander difficulty setting.