A Look Back At Star Raiders 104
blacklily8 writes "Gamasutra has just published our history of Doug Neubauer's Star Raiders, a 1979 game for the Atari 8-bit that offered 'high-speed first-person perspective through a fully navigable 3D-like environment in just 8K of RAM (memory) and 8K of ROM (storage).' Designed by the creator of the Atari's POKEY chip, Star Raiders was a hit on its home platform but now seems to have fallen into obscurity: 'Star Raiders is a shining example of what happens when a developer is told that something can't be done, does it anyway, and then is promptly forgotten for having done it.' In addition to describing the game itself, the article focuses on its impact on later games such as Wing Commander, X-Wing, and Elite."
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Well, in the case of the Atari 2600 it was assumed that 4K was enough. Later it was extended through bank-switching cartridges.
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Including pointless second posts increases the limit to more than 640K
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only if you haven't loaded your mouse driver and slashdot.com into himem...
Had it for the 800 (Score:1, Troll)
This came with the machine originally, but didn't much like it. Gameplay was pretty much absent.
Got better games in magazines, that you had to type by hand into the machine, and the debug for hours or days even because you inevitibly made typo's in the hunderds of lines of code.
Later, when we got a floppy drive for the machine, my father used to stop over on at Crazy Eddies in Montreal to get us games, those were the days, great stuff.
Anyway, my point is I think most of the games that took Star Raiders as i
Glad I'm not the only one who didn't like it. (Score:4, Interesting)
My experience playing Star Raiders was pretty poor. I'd sit there pecking at the controls for a few minutes, then something mysterious would happen and I'd get blown out of the water.... uh, vacuum. It seemed more like a technology demo than an actual game.
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By the time it came out I'd already written a "mainframe star trek" style game on the 11/70 at Berkeley.
Combining that with a "trigger twitcher", as you put it, was just a plain bad idea.
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What, no banana? Screw this - I'm never commenting again!
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Yeah - I remember playing this at Sears several time and not really figuring it out. However, I'd say the "clone" as they called it, Space Battle on the Intellivision was more an arcade game and the later Space Spartans was actually more similar to Star Raiders. Both had a similar map. The interesting thing is Space Battle's ships were Battlestar Galactica cylon like and Space Spartans were Star Wars ('79-80 was BSG and 82 was shortly before the last Episode VI). My brother and I played those games for.
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With all the current 3D OpenGL and such, I'm surprised nobody has tried to make a decent modern port of this with aspects true to the original.
There were/are related games which each improved upon the visual quality (, [wikipedia.org] Wing Commander [youtube.com] and Wing Commander V [dailymotion.com]).
Re:Glad I'm not the only one who didn't like it. (Score:5, Informative)
For the time, it was amazingly deep in terms of gameplay. I don't know what other real-time game you could even compare it to. You had several tactical views, you had to manage fuel, system-specific damage, the AI felt menacing (in terms of how it would home in on your starbases). Fuel wasn't just magic; you had to dock with a starbase to get more. The whole game was highly interactive in a real-time way: AI units would move when you were looking at the map view, you could veer off course in hyperspace and end up in adjacent sectors
I actually thought the visual side of things was fairly lame.
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I don't know what other real-time game you could even compare it to.
That kind of thing made more sense to me in turn-based text games like the super-enhanced Star Trek game on the DECsystem-20.
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Why? If you imagine yourself piloting a space fighter, these are all things you'd have to do in real time. Star Raiders was a conscious effort to combine the strategy of the Star Trek mainframe game and the Star Wars arcade game. IMO, it was a great success. To this day, I spend a lot more time playing Star Raiders than I do either of those games. To me it sounds like you just don't like it because you're bad at it.
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To me it sounds like you just don't like it because you're bad at it.
Yeh, I'm not good at playing a stripped down version of Star Trek and a twitch-based video game at the same time.
I'd rather do one at a time, especially back in the early '80s when there were some really awesome turn-based strategy- and tactical- level space war games on the ARPAnet.
If you imagine yourself piloting a space fighter [...]
I imagine I'd get blown out of vacuum on day one of that too.
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You forget, this was 1979. That kind of onscreen motion simply didn't exist at the time (at least, outside of vector displays). Starfields that fly past as though you were moving through them in 3-D? Planets shooting past? And not even in an arcade? Mind-blowing stuff, back then.
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You should have checked your radar, there was probably a fighter/pirate behind you. Elite had the same objective. You had to fight off the pirates ie. chase after them and kill them before you could do anything else, otherwise they are just going to wear down your shields until your ship explodes.
Any game is going to feel terrible if you don't what all your options are. I had a similar experience with those apache helicopter simulations. The goal was to land and rescue the hostages, but would always end up
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Oh god, I bought one helicopter simulator for the Amiga and after a weekend in which I managed to take off *once* I took it back.
Re:Had it for the 800 (Score:5, Informative)
That's no troll (Score:2)
I can see that Star Raiders was groundbreaking without having enjoyed it, that doesn't really make anyone a troll.
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It's not a troll to say you don't like Star Raiders. It is a troll to say "gameplay is pretty much absent", when the game is deeper than most other games of the time.
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To a casual drive-by gamer, they wouldn't have been able to sit and just get started, therefore to them gameplay was absent.
No kidding (Score:5, Funny)
Star Raiders was a hit on its home platform but now seems to have fallen into obscurity
In other news, Pong was a hit on its home platform, but now seems to have fallen into obscurity.
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Everybody knows Pong even if they don't play it anymore, I wouldn't call that obscurity.
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You show your age my friend. Talk to most 15 year olds of today and they don't know anything older than Doom, much less Pong.
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(cue 15 year old)
Doom? Wasn't that, like, you know, the first computer game, or something?
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It probably fell more into obscurity due to its horrific 2600 VCS port.
The port to the Atari 5200 was sweet and, at least by the screenshots, was faithful to the original. It was one of my favorite games growing up, in part because it wasn't some kind of terrible arcade knock-off.
Re:No kidding (Score:5, Interesting)
The port to the Atari 5200 was sweet and, at least by the screenshots, was faithful to the original.
That's hardly surprising- the 5200's internal hardware was apparently near-identical to the 400/800, with only minor tweaks to the memory map and replacement of ths OS with a simpler monitor program.
Aside from changing references to a few memory locations and altering the joystick handler to allow for the 5200's different controllers, the 5200 version is probably the same code as the original!
Although I was never a massive fan of Star Raiders personally (it was already almost ten years old when I first saw it), in retrospect I can see that it was a brilliant game and technical feat by the standards of its time. It definitely deserves a lot of respect for that along with adding some depth to the shoot-'em-up genre.
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I can attest to this, even though I never owned a 5200. There were several 5200 games that people had dumped and tweaked to run on the 8-bit computers. You could usually tell because (1) the sound was usually somewhat strange and (2) you had to press * and # on the keyboard to do certain things that would norm
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It probably fell more into obscurity due to its horrific 2600 VCS port.
I owned the Atari 2600 port, and it was always one of my favorites for the system (when it worked, that is). The port required much more reprogramming than the 5600 port due to the limitations of the system, (4K cartridge memory, 128 bits RAM, and some absolutely crazy graphical display constraints that you can read about on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
By far, the biggest limitation to playing the game (aside from losing the manual and forgetting what all the buttons do) was the lousy quality of the keypad that came with
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We used to play Bong Pong in college, on a 15-year old atari Pong machine. Every time you scored a point, you got to do a bong hit.
Of course, the game started out with people trying hard to points, but after a while it became hypnotic and mesmerizing as the players found the "BongPong Zone," which lasted until players forgot how operate the paddles.
Good times. Good times. Lasting brain damage.
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Of course, the game started out with people trying hard to points... players forgot how operate the paddles.
Good times. Good times. Lasting brain damage.
Clearly.
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Re:Forgotten? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who says it's forgotten? Nearly everyone I know who's my age remembers it quite fondly.
-jcr
I remember it quite well. What I find interesting is that many such games actually hold up well, despite graphics taht are best described as primitive; the gameplay was anything but and that's what made the games good. Simple concepts - fFooger, Space Invaders, even Pong still hold their own today.
X-Wing marketing conspiracy (Score:4, Interesting)
Lucas Arts announces an upcomming space sim followup to X Wing and Tie Fighter, lo and behold, someone Named Matt Barton ( http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/Matthew/Barton [linkedin.com] ) who is an online marketing consultant posts a story to the front page of Slashdot, plugging X-Wing (a true nerd would have plugged the fan favorite, TIE-Fighter), thus increasing marketing buzz for the new X-Wing title. Now, two questions for you slashdotters,
1. Am I reverse-psychology marketing you slashdotters for the new Lucas Arts game, and
2. Who will be the first one to find a monetary link between Matt Barton and Lucas Arts?
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I should have known!
Karl Marx quotation == bitter social science graduate who sold out and went into marketing.
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"You know, what this article really needs is a quote from Karl Marx." ...That sounds to me exactly the same as...
"You know, what this article really needs is a quote from Mein Kampf."
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Regardless of what you think about the content of his work, Marx was a state leader to approximately the same degree that Milton Friedman was a captain of industry.
Re:X-Wing marketing conspiracy (Score:5, Informative)
Boy, that Matt Barton sure did a lot to cover up his marketing tracks, like writing a book about vintage games [amazon.com] or being an assistant professor in Minnesota [gamasutra.com].
He's also listed right above the marketroid you mentioned [linkedin.com] - freak coincidence or the usual /. conspiracy?
You decide... (that is - if you've read that far...)
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That's very confusing. Apparently more than one person in the world is named "Matthew Barton". Why would parents choose such an obviously non-unique name for their child? Isn't this a problem that leads to identity theft and credit problems? I suppose I'm just lucky to be blessed with a name nobody else in the world or the history of the world has ever had so my name is more unique than my social security number.
- Vishna Rembilakalaktimenticus
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Samir: No one in this country can ever pronounce my name right. It's not that hard: Na-ghee-na-na-jar. Nagheenanajar.
Michael Bolton: Yeah, well, at least your name isn't Michael Bolton.
Samir: You know, there's nothing wrong with that name.
Michael Bolton: There *was* nothing wrong with it... until I was about twelve years old and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys.
Samir: Hmm... well, why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael?
Michael Bolton: No way! Why should
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Your story wasn't all that funny.
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It wasn't all bad. I think the funniest part was:
"I was trying to pick up a woman who was sitting at the bar, and talking to her about video games in general."
Video link (Score:4, Informative)
Video of the game on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlsdNKPYw0s [youtube.com].
The article managed to work in a Karl Marx quotation--and it actually fits!
What an article! (Score:1)
Wow, this is one of the worst articles I've read in a while. Rambling, uninformative...The Youtube video it links to is actually one of the worst (you can't see anything!) available. I walk away feeling like I know less about the game than when I started...And I OWNED it.
In those days coders could actually code (Score:2)
Try and get the latest generation of coders out of uni to do something in 8K of memory and they'll probably just about manage "hello" before they complain that their favourite singleton class needs more memory to instantiate their modified string class I/O subsystem so they won't be able to print out "world" and expecting anyone to
do that in 8K is clearly impossible.
I jest , but anyone who had to code a serious app in available memory measured in kilobytes knows just how bloated todays development enviromen
Re:In those days coders could actually code (Score:5, Insightful)
I jest , but anyone who had to code a serious app in available memory measured in kilobytes knows just how bloated todays development enviroments and even compiled output is.
No, actually, we don't. Writing a program that fits into 8KB is a lot easier if you don't have to worry about anyone ever reading or modifying your code (games shipped once and were never patched / updated) or portability ('porting' back then meant 'writing the same game on a different architecture'). It's fun writing heavily-optimized code, and it's a great feeling of achievement when you make something work in tight resource constraints, but it's not a sensible way of doing development. A lot of us can still write code that fits into those constraints, but choose not to because we can be orders of magnitude more productive if we don't. Next time you're feeling nostalgic, remember the line from the Stantec Zebra manual, explaining that the 150 instruction limitation for Simple Code programs was not a problem, because no maintainable program could be longer than 150 instructions.
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"Writing a program that fits into 8KB is a lot easier if you don't have to worry about anyone ever reading or modifying your code (games shipped once and were never patched / updated) or portability ('porting' back then meant 'writing the same game on a different architecture')"
Right , because 8 bits games were never ported to multiple types of machines.
Oh , wait....
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They weren't ported -- they were completely rewritten from scratch for each new machine.
How else are you going to explain Pac Man for the 2600? [wikipedia.org]
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Not entirely true, infocom used a vm underneath and had a lisp like language to implement their games.
I also can remember a C compiler for the Atari XL not that you really could get decent programs out of it.
If you wanted to get something working you had to go the assembler route!
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"They weren't ported -- they were completely rewritten from scratch for each new machine."
For some they were , for some they weren't. If the CPU is the same on different machines you don't need to rewrite the core logic, just the I/O sections and any memory address handling.
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Well, it depends on which machines are involved in the porting. Atari 2600 games were written in assembly and due to the 2600's "roll your own" graphics system 90% of the code is I/O. Typically the "core logic" of the game could only run during vertical blanking.
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I'd say yes for computers, no for old consoles. I ported Z80 code (Tandy) to Apple ][ and in general it was pretty straightforward, but porting pretty much anything to, say an Atari 2600 or Intellivision is an entirely different bird - for starters, Intellivisions were 10 bit, and nothing is really straightforward to port. The main processor of the Atari 2600 was actually a stripped down 6502 (called a MOS 6507) which could only access 8k of memory, but Atari's cartridge slot only allowed 4k of this to be
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Writing a program that fits in 8KB is a lot easier when you are using tools and architectures designed to target such memory constrained systems.
First of all, you have an 8 bit processor. Most commands are one byte, most operands are one or two bytes.
Secondly, you don't load everything into RAM. A lot of what you want is on system ROM or (in this case I'm guessing) a game ROM. It's tricky to manage this, true, but the user in those days tolerated delays that didn't interfere with actual game play.
Fina
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What delays? Games off of cartridges load a lot faster than off of anything else.
Maybe others remember games on cartridge-based systems that have delays. I'd be interested in examples of them if there are.
BTW, many of the PS2 games I've played are well-designed and have negligible delays, except for the original starting of the game. Others [even some of my favorites, like Psychonauts] have horrific delays between levels, or sometimes even within a level.
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Yes, cassettes are obviously entirely different from cartridges (ROMs).. Cassettes are obviously way slower than floppies too..
But he seemed to have actually seen delays with cartridges. Even with bank switching or other hacks to get 'extra' space, there shouldn't be noticeable loading times.
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Try and get the latest generation of coders out of uni to do something in 8K of memory and they'll probably just about manage "hello" before they complain that their favourite singleton class needs more memory to instantiate their modified string class I/O subsystem so they won't be able to print out "world" and expecting anyone to
do that in 8K is clearly impossible.
I jest , but anyone who had to code a serious app in available memory measured in kilobytes knows just how bloated todays development enviroments and even compiled output is.
Well if you can spend two days on a hello world output you still can press it into a few bytes... but no one is paying for that stuff!
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I've been programming since the 1970s, professionally since the early 80s.
There are more great programmers today than there was then, and many, many more very good ones, and vastly more really bad ones.
Things were different then. It's very common now to build programs that run for an unpredictable amount of time, handling asynchronous data inputs of an unpredictable nature. That amounts to your typical desktop application or web service. Back then, that described mainly operating systems. The vast majo
Star Raiders vs. Star Master (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the problems with Star Raiders on the 2600 is that it required a keypad to play, and if you didn't have a "Video touch pad" you were screwed. I nearly screwed over my chances to get a NES when I asked for the video touch pad as an alternative. (My parents never could find the device. It was extremely rare, even in 1989.
Star Master on the other hand had no such requirement. The game required two Atari controllers and the switches to play. It had superior game play. (It had a rank called Wing Commander. a Foreshadowing of the Wing Commander series?)
Years later I played star Raiders on an emulator, and based on what I had seen, if I had gotten that video touch pad instead of the NES, I would have been furious. Star Raiders for the 2600 was horrible.
God I feel old.
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Actually, the keypads from "Basic Programming" would have worked too. They were electrically identical, but the VTP looked much, much cooler. Also, there was a big kiddie button pad for the Sesame Street 2600 games, but you would have been laughed right out of your neighborhood if seen using that.
I thought the VTP was only a pack-in with Star Raiders 2600 anyhow. How could you have gotten the game without it, other than by buying it used?
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Thats exactly right. It came in a shoebox with 10 other games. I had no idea what a "Video touch pad" even was.
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Really? Atari Age only rates it a 3 in their rarity guide. And it's not like you could do much with the cart, you were limited to 11 lines.
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One of the problems with Star Raiders on the 2600 is that it required a keypad to play, and if you didn't have a "Video touch pad" you were screwed. I nearly screwed over my chances to get a NES when I asked for the video touch pad as an alternative. (My parents never could find the device. It was extremely rare, even in 1989.
When I got Star Raiders for 2600, it came packaged with the extra controller. The whole package got resold pretty quickly at a huge loss. It was terrible on that platform. You're right that Starmaster was much better. Like other Activision games of that time, you could send in a screenshot of your score and get a token -- a patch with your rank as I recall. The 7200 version of Star Raiders was much better, and I wore out two controllers with that game.
I'm not the only one fascinated by 8KiB of RAM (Score:3, Interesting)
Even now, it seems the C64 scene is alive and well.
Recently I stumbled across another, newer project. The Fuzebox. It's a 28mhz dual-chip(chip, not CPU) retro console, with 4KiB of RAM and 64KiB of flash. Someone actually got a movie player working on it...
Video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWWsSn_QKLM [youtube.com]
Homepages:
- http://www.ladyada.net/make/fuzebox/ [ladyada.net]
- http://belogic.com/uzebox/ [belogic.com]
Apparently many people are fascinated by working with minute amounts of memory.
Train my dog to bite anyone who says "kibibyte";-) (Score:2)
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I think you're an imposter! If you were a real retro computer fan on a nostalgia trip, you'd be thinking of it as "8K" or "64K". No-one ever even called it "64KB" in those days, let alone the vile SI-nitpickers-in-cahoots-with-marketers-pandering-vileness that is "64KiB" (spit!)
But there were the rabid anti-IBMers who used the tongue twisting "kilo-octets".
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Hey, I never said I was a member of the C64 scene!
Just pointing it out. Recently I was looking up microcontrollers for a project, and was quite shocked to realize they've passed the imfamous C64! :P
I wonder if Atmel [atmel.com] are C64 enthusiasts? They still list their S-RAM in K. And here I thought they were just being sloppy!
Elite lives on... (Score:2)
As a former owner of a BBC Micro Model B as a teenager, I remember Elite and an amazing (for its time) racing game called Revs.
Oh G-d I feel old...
Re:Elite lives on... (Score:4, Interesting)
Elite is primary a spaceship simulation game, with elements of commerce thrown in to a good measure, while Eve is a massively multiplayer role-playing game with strong elements of economy and politics.
The opportunity is still out there for a developer who wants to create a Frontier - Elite II clone that is massively multiplayer. No software house seems to have hit the spot yet.
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Agreed, EVE isn't a good substitude for Elite. Sounds like you were more looking for something like Jumpgate Evolution [jumpgateevolution.com].
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Check out Vendetta Online
http://www.vendetta-online.com/ [vendetta-online.com]
Elite is one of my all time favorite games and Vendetta had me hooked for a year or so with it's great twitch based combat.
Star Raiders got killed (Score:2)
By a Japanese style remake for the Atari ST a few years later that ruined the franchise. The original Star Raiders had a yankee dystopic feel to it, but the change in feel for the ST version was just too much. And by then Wing Commander was the most influential game of the genre "launch my little fighter from a spaceship and go fight hoards of enemies" genre.
I liked star raiders but it was no M.U.L.E. (Score:2)
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holy crap. All this time I thought I just never learned to type. I never connected it to our first computer (the Atari 400). World... crashing....down.....oi.
Enjoyed Star Raiders ][ more (Score:2)
That was a hell of a game. I still get chills when thinking about refueling in the outer atmosphere of the star. Lost many a ship that way.
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The music was pretty awesome too. And I seem to remember some of the larger enemy ships bearing a passing resemblance to the Enterprise.
He used the black&white toggle for the map (Score:2)
This game was really awesome.
Not to be confused with Activision's Starmaster--instead of a keypad that game used the black&white toggle switches for the extra controls.
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Naturally I was referring to the Atari 2600 version of this excellent game.
Star Raiders and Atari 8 bit vs C-64 in retrospect (Score:1)
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The 64 kicked the 800's butt in terms of platform games (it has better sprites)
Indeed. IIRC, Atari's "Player Missile Graphics" only allowed for 3 player sprites and 4 missile sprites (or 4 and 0 respectively if you chose that route). All sprites were monochrome. Players were 8-pixels wide, and missiles were 2 pixels wide. I never did any serious game development on the platform, but I always figured most games used their own blitting routines for sprites.
Could the article be more annoyingly pedantic? (Score:1)
If these guys are trying to sell a book, this isn't the way to do it. The article really turned me off because of their writing style. Barely relevant references to Karl Marx, Star Trek, Red Dwarf are annoying enough, but inserting them as footnotes is beyond pompous. I suppose I got some pleasure out of the juxtaposition of Loguidice's typically purple prose next to Atari VCS screenshots, though.
Star Raiders was Atari's killer app (Score:1)
The Atari 400/800 set my net worth back by half (Score:1)
Discovering this machine in my early twenties wasted so much great time.
Star Raiders - I first saw it in Erols playing on a 'big screen' (25" or so). I had to have one - up til then I had been saving for an Apple - now it all went to a 400 with tape machine, BASIC, one joy stick and Star Raiders.
Star Raiders - 3D first person stick controllable space warfare, a full set auxiliary systems that impacted gameplay - with great strategy to boot.
I hooked more friends on that game and sold a few Ataris.
I always
What is RAM Anyway? (Score:1)
Mercenary? (Score:1)