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In 1979 Atari launched their 400 and 800 series home computers.  One hardware engineer, Doug Neubauer, had been working in his spare time on a game…

… that synthesised the frenetic action of Spacewar! …

…and the more strategic elements of the text-only Star Trek style games that were popular at the time. 

On this screen you can see the Zylons closing in on the star bases of the Atarian empire.

Star Raiders was the first game for the new Atari computers and showed off their capabilities.  It was the first real time 3D game.  It looks and plays a lot like Elite or Wing Commander but without the trading aspect or the FMV.  In fact it was sold on an 8K ROM cartridge.

Some familiar themes emerge from the development.  I am quoting from an interview with Neubauer:

• Developing at the cutting edge: “The routines in Star Raiders are total hacks! It was the first game to use 3-D algorithms, and the ones I came up with were terrible. They worked, but were slow.”
• Balancing: “When I was doing the final touch-up on Star Raiders, a lot of people at Atari were playing the game. This allowed me to fine tune the scoring algorithm.”

This is pretty much where I start following games.  I saw Star Raiders at a computer show in the Novotel out in Earl’s Court.  It must have been 1980 or 1981 and I was mesmerised by it.  I had an Atari 400 a few years later and now I have an Atari 800.  I still play this game now and again.  

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To play Star Raiders, you'll need to download an Atari 800 emulator and system ROMs.  There are several available but the one I used is here.  There's a copy of the game's manual here.  Finally, click here for a pretty comprehensive library of games.  To run the game you have to load the .atr game image into one of the virtual disk drives and reboot the emulator.

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