Star Raiders

Star Raiders, released for the Atari 800 8-bit microcomputer in 1980 (that's a lot of 8s) is a bit baffling to me. Having put a few hours into it, beating it on its first two difficulty settings, the biggest impression I came away with was, quite simply, "How the hell did they do that on an 8-bit microcomputer?" The game is nothing if not a technical showcase, a first person space sim with 6 degrees of freedom movement in some sort of an approximation of 3 dimensional space, in 1980. Not only that, it actually runs well for the most part!

The game was made by one of the developers of the Atari 800 hardware after the project was finished, and he clearly had quite a handle on how to get the most out of the system. It bears the hallmarks of a one-man hobby project, most notably a pretty heavy hand when it comes to referencing the sci fi media that influenced it. You'll be shooting photon torpedoes at enemy ships that look suspiciously like TIE fighters (and according to the manual your own ship moves under the power of Twin Ion Engines), who are themselves part of the Zylon (not cylon, Zylon) military. Honestly it's pretty charming, and makes it really easy to settle into the tone of the game; we're here to have some light-hearted fun, not engage in a worldbuilding exercise or tell a nuanced story. You're the good guy, they're the bad guys, clear 'em out before they destroy you.

For the most part it really is that simple. You don't have any objective more complex than "clear all the enemies out of your chunk of space, as quickly as possible, using as little energy as possible, allowing as few friendly starbases to be destroyed as possible." The manual gives you the formula the game uses to calculate your score at the end of a run, and that's really all there is to it aside from a modifier for what difficulty you're on, and it's mostly straightforward. The biggest twist is that destroyed friendly starbases dock you more points if the enemy destroys them than if you destroy them. If one is a lost cause, you're allowed and, indeed, even encouraged, to blow up your own cases rather than let them fall into enemy hands. Not only will this help preserve your score, it also deprives the enemy of reinforcements, as any base that they manage to destroy themselves will spawn two new fighters that you'll now have to take care of. It's honestly a really flavorful detail.

The game doesn't have the openness and complexity players would come to expect from the space sim genre, it's a tight little strategic arcade shooter. You've got a handful of subsystems that can be damaged, depriving you of access to various mechanical functions (provided you're on a difficulty other than the lowest one), and you can warp between different sectors and stop at starbases to refuel and repair, but this isn't Elite Dangerous. You don't have economic elements to deal with, there's nothing to do other than fly around, dogfight, and repair. And each of these activities is, in itself, pretty simple. Dogfighting is a matter of putting enemies in crosshairs. Once you've cleared out the sector, you select a new one on the galactic chart (prioritizing targets based on what starbase is in danger and how much energy it'll take to get where you're going), warp there (using your steering to keep yourself on course unless you're on novice) and do it all over again. Sometimes you'll need to use the computer's range and heading indicators to find your way to the enemy, or the long-range scanner if those are knocked out, but even then there's really not a lot of complexity to manage within any one task. Instead, the complexity of the overall package comes from the fact that you're required to repeatedly switch between several simple tasks. Any given sector will have no more than 4 enemy units, and the fleet is spread out across dozens of squadrons which will attack your starbases. You quickly settle into a rhythm of dogfighting, selecting which sector to target next, and occasionally taking time to get repaired, and taken as a whole it gives a real sense of verisimilitude to the proceedings; it turns a simple arcade dogfighting game into a pitched interstellar battle, absolutely massive in scope.

I don't think it can be understated how much Star Raiders' presentation does for it, either. The star field streaking by as you accelerate into hyperspace, the way enemies sweep back and forth across your view, watching a friendly starbase send out a little drone to repair and refuel you in real time, it absolutely lights the imagination on fire in a way that you just didn't see very often at this point in time. Add to that the sheer scale, the fact that without you computer and scanners you basically have no hope of finding anything in whatever sector you're in, and you have a starscape that feels truly alive and imposing. As for inside the cockpit, the control interface of the Atari 800 hardware, a classic one-button Atari joystick for aiming and shooting and a keyboard for everyone else, perfectly sells the feeling of piloting a starfighter with a control stick and a dashboard full of switches to hit. And you really are using that dashboard constantly, it's how you turn on your shield before battle, access the galactic map to select your next sector, jump to hyperspace, and swap between front and aft views. It's not exactly the most taxing simulation (energy management mostly comes down to making smart decisions with warp jumps and maybe, in dire straits, turn the shields off to conserve your supply) but it's nonetheless quite engrossing. Much like the overall rhythm of play, the combination of these individually unremarkable, even shallow, elements produces a sort of alchemy that remains consistently engaging throughout a play session, and when combined with the liberal use of popular sci fi iconography, the whole thing grabs the imagination in a way that's truly exciting. The entire game is quite simply more than the sum of its parts.