Star Raiders was written on the side. Doug Neubauer was a chip designer at Atari, in charge of the design of POKEY, the sound and input chip in the new Atari 400 and 800. He started the game in early 1979, before there were any games for those computers, and he was never paid a royalty for it. “At the time, I was a chip design engineer and did Star Raiders more or less on the side,” he told ANALOG Computing in 1986. By then the magazine could tell him that many of its readers had bought their Atari “solely because of” it.
The idea came from the Star Trek game “played on the mainframe computers of that time”. It was all text and not played in real time. Neubauer kept their ship damage, their sector scanners and charts, and their ranks, which gave him “the idea of a rating rather than a score”, and made it happen in real time, in 3D, through the cockpit window.
Fast facts
- Publisher: Atari.
- Author: Doug Neubauer.
- First shown: West Coast Computer Faire, May 1979.
- On sale: by spring 1980, on an 8K ROM cartridge for the Atari 400 and 800. Atari’s price in 1981 was $59.95.
- Controls: joystick for flying and firing, keyboard for shields, speed, views, the galactic chart and hyperwarp.
- Later versions: a cut-down Atari 2600 cartridge, played with a joystick and the new video touch pad (reviewed early 1983), and a version for the Atari 5200.
Playing it
You start by choosing a mission: Novice, Pilot, Warrior or Commander. In Novice the enemy Zylons do not fire back. From the front view of your ship you see stars streaming past; press G and the galactic chart shows a grid of sectors, the Zylon squadrons and the friendly starbases they are hunting. Put the cursor on a sector and engage the hyperwarp engines. Electronic Games called the jump through “null-space” the game’s “single most breathtaking visual”, “a science fiction vision straight from ‘Star Wars’!”
When you arrive in an occupied sector the screen flashes red, a klaxon sounds and a “Red Alert” appears. Zylon fighters, cruisers and basestars dive past the front screen, vanish and reappear on the rear view. Hits damage your ship’s systems, and a starbase can repair them: it sends out a small shuttle that floats across and readies the ship for relaunch. All the while the Zylons are moving on the map, trying to surround and destroy your starbases, so the battle in front of you is only part of the game. Neubauer thought this mix was new: “I think it was the first game to combine action with a strategy screen.”
The game gives you a rank at the end of a mission rather than a bare score, and the top rank is Star Commander Class 1. Neubauer tuned it to the players around him. “Every time someone got to be a Star Commander Class 1, I bumped up the scoring difficulty,” he said. “Even a week before we made the ROMs, I was still increasing the difficulty.”
900 bytes over
The game had to fit in 8K of ROM and run in 8K of RAM. “When I finished the first pass on the game, I was 900 bytes over the 8K limit,” Neubauer said, so there was no room for secret messages, and planet landings and a trench scene were left out. In 1980 he told Compute! he had spent eight to ten months programming it, when a 2K Atari game usually took five or six.
He was frank about the code. “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. That’s why the game slows down when there’s an explosion.” Each explosion has about 64 pieces, all moving in three dimensions. The program is built from modules: movement, collision detection, audio, photon firing, the “Zylon brain”, the console display, the galactic chart with its enemy strategy, and the long-range scanner. Its sounds are generated by algorithms rather than read from tables.
What reviewers said
BYTE’s Gregg Williams opened his May 1981 review with “What can you say about a game that takes your breath away?” He had first seen it at the West Coast Computer Faire two years before, “and in the two years that have passed since the first public viewing of the game, no one—I repeat, no one—has created either a home-computer game or a coin-operated video game that is better than Star Raiders.” He compared it with VisiCalc, the spreadsheet that sold Apple IIs, and ended with a message to other publishers: “this is the game you have to surpass to get our attention.”
Electronic Games agreed in its first issue, dated Winter 1981: Star Raiders was “the game that, in the opinion of many, sells a lot of 400 computer systems”, “a brilliantly conceived, state-of-the-art program” that was “far superior to all past efforts” among the Star Trek-style games. It suggested three people could play it together, one on the joystick, one on the console and one in the command chair offering advice.
When Atari brought it to the 2600, Electronic Games noted in February 1983 that the computer version “has consistently rated at the top of our readers’ popularity poll”. The console cartridge was “slightly slimmed down”, but the reviewer found “the amazing thing is not how much had to be cut, but rather how much the designers crammed into this cartridge”.
By the time the cartridge was in the shops, Neubauer had left Atari to design chips for Hewlett-Packard’s calculator division in Oregon. In 1986 he wrote Solaris for the 2600, which ANALOG Computing described as having “both similarities and contrasts to Star Raiders”. His own verdict on the original was mixed: “I guess the part I liked best was the explosion; I never was really satisfied with the hyperwarp display.”
Sources
- Lee H. Pappas, “An interview with Doug Neubauer”, ANALOG Computing issue 47, October 1986, pp. 89–90: POKEY, the start of the game in early 1979, Star Trek as the inspiration, the ranks, the 8K limit and the 900 bytes, the code and the explosions, the modules, the difficulty tuning, royalties, readers who bought an Atari for the game, Solaris.
- Michael S. Tomczyk, “Star Raiders: The Wizard Behind the Game”, and Joretta Klepfer, “Star Raiders Defend the Galaxy”, Compute! issue 3, April 1980, pp. 74–75: Neubauer as a 26-year-old chip designer, eight to ten months of programming, the move to Hewlett-Packard.
- Gregg Williams, “BYTE’s Arcade: Star Raiders”, BYTE, May 1981, pp. 106–108: the West Coast Computer Faire, May 1979; the review; $59.95.
- Electronic Games, vol. 1 no. 1, Winter 1981: review of the Atari 400/800 version.
- Electronic Games, February 1983: review of the Atari 2600 version and the video touch pad.
- Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, December 1982: listing of the Atari 5200 version.
- The Book of Atari Software 1983, p. 75: the Zylons’ strategy “to surround and destroy each of your star bases”; the four skill levels.