People who went into a branch of Dixons in 1986 and switched on a demonstration Atari ST often heard it sing. The title screen of Starglider played ten seconds or so of sampled music, a tune with words, on a machine whose sound chip had no way to play samples. Computer & Video Games thought readers would check that their radio was switched off. Behind the tune was a fast 3D shoot-’em-up drawn in crisp wireframe vector graphics, begun when its author, Jez San, was 19, and published by Rainbird. It sold well enough to turn San’s one-man business, Argonaut, into a real company.
Fast facts
- Author: Jez San (Argonaut), who wrote the Atari ST and Amiga versions himself.
- Publisher: Rainbird, the full-price label of British Telecom’s Telecomsoft.
- Released: Atari ST at the end of August 1986, at £24.95; Amiga by spring 1987.
- Graphics: wireframe vector 3D with hidden-line removal. The solid, filled 3D came with the sequel.
- Conversions: Spectrum and Amstrad CPC by Realtime Games, £14.95 and £15 on cassette; Commodore 64 by Solid Image; later versions for the Macintosh and PC.
- In the box: a 64-page novella by James Follett, a playguide and a poster.
- Sequel: Starglider 2 (1988), in filled 3D.
A Star Wars game that never was
Starglider began as something else. San told Edge in 2000 that he had tried to get the rights to make a Star Wars game: “negotiations didn’t work out so I deviated from my plan”. His first version had the player “shooting the tops off towers, just like the Star Wars coin-op”. He started it on a rented Apple Macintosh, then moved to the Atari ST and Amiga when they appeared, and by his own account the game took from 1984 to 1986.
The route to a publisher ran through Elite. San and his school friend Fouad Katan had built a programmers’ development system that Telecomsoft used to convert Elite from the BBC Micro to the Commodore 64. “I agreed to help them port Elite,” San told Retro Gamer, “if they agreed to give me my own game deal – Starglider.” A demonstration of its 3D graphics ran on Atari’s stand at the Personal Computer World Show in September 1985, and the finished game reached the shops a year later, after what Atari ST User called “many a delayed launch”.
San did not work alone. Rainbird’s producer, Gary Sheinwald, typed in the coordinates of every point of every 3D model, drawn on graph paper by Paul Hibbard, and did most of the testing. Rick Clucas wrote low-level routines. Near the end, San said, he and Sheinwald took shifts: one fixed bugs while the other slept next door, then they swapped.
Novenia and the Egrons
The story came from James Follett, the novelist and scriptwriter of Who Dares Wins, whose 64-page novella came in the box. The planet Novenia is guarded by automatic Sentinels. After the Sentinels shoot down a flock of Stargliders, protected migrating birds, they are reprogrammed to leave the birds alone, and the Egrons invade in ships disguised as Stargliders. Two survivors, Jaysan and Katra, set out in an old museum-piece fighter, an Airborne Ground Attack Vehicle (AGAV). San and Follett worked out the scenario together and exchanged drafts as book and game grew. The novella explained, among other things, why the world looked the way it did: after the war the planet was dark, which is why you could see through structures and enemies.
The book was also the manual. C&VG found it “packed with invaluable hints and tips”, including how to refuel. Computer Gamer was less charmed: players who wanted to know “what they’re supposed to achieve” had to “plough through a tedious novella”, and Rainbird’s habit of bundling books had become “an excuse to skimp on certain aspects of the program itself”.
Playing it
The AGAV flies over a flat grid 100 units square. Four rotating repair depots dotted over the surface repair the ship, recharge its shields and lasers, and supply one missile at a time; the ship can carry two. Fuel comes from nowhere but the power lines strung between tall towers, which you have to skim along at low speed and height while enemies attack. Tanks, fighters, walkers and stompers patrol the planet, and walkers and stompers can only be destroyed with missiles. When you fire one, the view switches to a camera on the missile, which you steer onto the target. The flagship, Starglider One, flaps its wings like the bird it imitates and takes three missile hits to destroy.
The technical trick
Starglider is a vector game: its objects are outlines, not filled shapes. CRASH called it “the best vector graphics game to date”, and Amstrad Action’s Mastergame review praised its “fast-moving vector graphics”. What set it apart was hidden-line removal, which stops you seeing the far edges of an object through its near side. San pointed out to C&VG that Mercenary did not have it. Objects stayed modelled even when they were off screen, and San said he rewrote the drawing routines about ten times, “each time making them smaller and faster”.
The sound was his proudest achievement. The ST’s sound chip had three tone channels and, in San’s words, “no analogue output and certainly no waveform”. San told Edge that he opened up an ST and put a voltmeter across the chip’s outputs, then measured the voltages produced by different combinations of volume settings on the three channels. From those he built a lookup table that let the program play waveforms by changing the volumes in real time. He hired a synthesiser to record the song, with music by David Lowe. In-game effects stayed unsampled, because sampled explosions “would have slowed things down so much”.
The conversions
Rainbird had Realtime Games, the team behind 3D Starstrike, convert the game to the 8-bit machines. C&VG admitted it had doubted a Spectrum version could be done at all: “It can’t be done and if it is, it’ll look awful. Well, Rainbird has and it doesn’t.” CRASH gave the Spectrum version 95% in its 1986 Christmas issue, and 97% to the 128K version on the other side of the cassette, which added extra missions, a David Lowe tune and speech by Clare Edgeley of Rainbird. One reviewer thought the speech knocked “the stuffing out of the Atari ST version”. Computer Gamer’s Spectrum reviewer went further, calling it “the best piece of vector graphic programming which has been seen on a home computer” and saying it showed “what a rush job was done on the ST version”. CRASH readers then voted it the best game of 1986, and it came third for sound effects. Accepting that one, Realtime’s Graeme Baird said it made worthwhile “the two days we spent sitting down with a multimeter measuring the Spectrum’s power output”. Amstrad Action made the CPC version a Mastergame with 91%.
The Commodore 64 version, by Solid Image, fared worse. ZZAP!64 scored it 68% in February 1987, complaining of jerky graphics, a sluggish response to the joystick and a £14.95 price that was “a high expenditure for some slick packaging and a mediocre game”. San later agreed that it “wasn’t great”, and asked how much of that was the machine’s fault.
Starglider 2
The sequel, Starglider 2 (1988), was written by a larger Argonaut team and took the fight to a whole star system, flying above and below planet surfaces and between them. ACE announced the change in October 1988: “Gone are the vector graphics of the original game”, replaced by solid filled 3D, and gave it 927 out of 1000. It shipped on a single disk that loaded on both the ST and the Amiga. A third game was discussed but never appeared.
What it did for Argonaut
San said he lived on the advance for a couple of years while finishing the game, still at home with his parents, and that when it came out it “flew off the shelves”. The royalties let Argonaut take an office and grow from one person to six and then ten. The same Starglider technology went into Argonaut’s flight simulator Birds of Prey, and its 3D work led to Starglider on Nintendo hardware and, in time, to the Super FX chip and Star Fox. The Argonaut entry tells that story.
Sources
- Atari ST User vol. 1 no. 7, September 1986, p. 7: “Launched at last” (the PCW Show demonstration in 1985, the delays, the story, Jaysan and Katra, the novella, hidden-line removal, £24.95).
- Computer Gamer, September 1986: debut on the ST at the end of August. Computer Gamer issue 22, January 1987: Spectrum review, p. 13; ST review, pp. 59–60 (the novella; “the best 3D vector graphics seen on the ST so far”).
- CRASH issue 36, Christmas 1986, pp. 22–24: Spectrum review (Realtime; £14.95; the 128K version, David Lowe and Clare Edgeley; 95% and 97%). CRASH issue 38, March 1987, pp. 34–36: readers’ awards for 1986 (Best Game Overall, 12.5%; third for sound effects; Graeme Baird’s comment, printed under the name “Graham”). CRASH issue 28, May 1986, p. 20: Starstrike II review, crediting “Graeme Baird”.
- Computer & Video Games issue 63, January 1987: Spectrum review; “Sans of Time”, interview with Jez San and ST review (Follett; hidden lines; the drawing routines; sampled music; the story).
- ZZAP!64 issue 22, February 1987, pp. 26–27: Commodore 64 review (68%).
- Amstrad Action issue 17, February 1987, pp. 50–51: CPC review, Mastergame (Realtime; £15; 91%).
- Computer Gamer issue 25, April 1987: Rainbird’s Starglider for the Amiga 500.
- ACE issue 13, October 1988, pp. 75–77: Starglider 2 review (927; “Gone are the vector graphics of the original game”).
- “The making of… StarGlider”, Edge issue 90, November 2000, pp. 141–144: the Star Wars rights, the Dixons demonstration machines, James Follett, the ST sound chip, Gary Sheinwald, the advance and royalties.
- “The Making of Starglider”, Retro Gamer Collection vol. 6, 2012, pp. 74–77: 1984–1986, the Macintosh, the development system and the Elite deal, the team, the novella, the conversions and Solid Image, Starglider 2.
- The One for ST Games issue 39, December 1991, p. 24: the move from the Macintosh to the ST and Amiga; Birds of Prey and “Starglider technology”.