Galactic Chart and hyperspace

The overall gameplay in Star Raiders is adapted from earlier text-based Star Trek computer games in which the player's ship maneuvers about a two-dimensional grid fighting a fleet of enemy spaceships. In Star Raiders, this part of the game takes the form of a "Galactic Chart" display dividing the game's large-scale world into a grid of sectors, some of which are occupied by enemy ships or friendly "starbases". The Galactic Map is the equivalent of the earlier game's Long Range Scan.

Flying about in the 3D view with the ship's normal engines is sufficient for travel within a sector; travel between sectors is via "hyperspace", accomplished through an elaborate and noisy "hyperwarp" sequence with graphics loosely reminiscent of the Star Wars and Star Trek films in which the stars seemed to stretch to radial lines. On the higher difficulty levels, hyperwarp has a skill element; the player has to keep a wandering cross hair roughly centered during the sequence in order to arrive precisely at the desired destination.

Combat, damage and resources

To the Star Trek formula, the game added real-time 3D space battles. In the main first-person display, the player can look out the front or rear of the ship and shoot "photons" at Zylon ships, which come in three different varieties reminiscent of ships from Star Wars, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica (whose villains were the similarly titled Cylons). A small targeting display in the lower right corner gives a general indication of a distant enemy or star base's position relative to the player's ship, and also indicates when weapons are locked on the enemy, at which point the player's weapons fire will track the enemy like a guided missile if the targeting computer is turned on. There is also a "long-range scan" screen showing the surrounding region in a third-person overhead view centered on your ship, operating like a long-range radar display.

Enemy ships come in three types. The standard Zylon fighters resemble the TIE fighter. The more powerful Patrol ships loosely resemble the front-on view of a Klingon Battlecruiser. The most powerful Zylon ship, the Basestar, has a pulsating orange glow and resembles a Cylon Basestar. In order to destroy the Zylon Basestar the player must hit the target at close range.

Enemies will fire back, which can cause damage if the player's ship is hit. The ship can also be damaged by collision with random meteoroids. Instead of the multiple lives that were a common video-game convention, the Star Raiders ship has only one life, but is completely destroyed only if hit while its energy shields are lowered or destroyed; otherwise it will sustain varying types of damage, which causes shields, engines, weapons or information displays to be destroyed or damaged. The player has to manage finite energy reserves as well as damage to the ship; it can be repaired and restocked by rendezvous with a friendly star base. The enemy can also destroy a star base if allowed to surround its Galactic Chart sector for too long, so the star bases have to be defended. All this lends Star Raiders a degree of complexity and a sense of player immersion that was rare in action games of the era.

One noteworthy flaw in Star Raiders is that it is possible for the player to avoid incoming objects, while stationary, simply by rotating the ship. This happens because the game engine rotates the positions of objects, but does not rotate their trajectories.

Scoring

In contrast to many games of the era, the player can actually win the game by destroying all enemy ships in the galaxy. However, there is no running score display; only upon winning, dying or quitting the game will the player receive a "rating", which is a quasi-military rank accompanied by a numerical class with particularly bad play earning a rank of "Garbage Scow Captain" or "Galactic Cook". The rating depends on a formula involving the game play level, energy and time used, star bases destroyed, the number of enemies destroyed, and whether the player succeeded in destroying all enemies, was destroyed, or aborted (quit) the mission.

Some possible ratings were (from highest to lowest):

• Star Commander (Class 1)
• Commander
• Captain
• Warrior
• Lieutenant
• Major
• Ace
• Pilot
• Ensign
• Novice
• Rookie (Class 5)

Star Raiders uses many techniques that would become common features of Atari 8-bit game programming in the 1980s.

One notable feature of the game was that the main simulation continued running even when the user was interacting with other display. For instance, one might be attacked while examining the Galactic Map. This was unusual for the time, if not unique.

The star field is drawn in a graphics mode that (at full screen coverage) provides 160×96 bitmapped pixels with a palette of four colors. This mode is called "GRAPHICS 7" in Atari BASIC. The use of an indirect palette means that color changes associated with the presence or absence of energy shields, emergency alarms, and the screen flash representing destruction of the ship can be accomplished by simply changing the palette values in memory registers.

Enemy ships, shots, and most other moving objects use Atari's variant of hardware sprites, known as player-missile graphics. The Atari supported only four of these "players" (and four simpler "missiles") but the game sometimes had more moving objects on-screen. In particular, the "radar" display in the lower right of screen was drawn using the background graphics, and updated much more slowly than the sprites. The same was true for the debris particles emitted when an enemy ship is destroyed, and are actually calculated as 3D points. Since the 6502 does not have a native multiply or divide command, the game slows down considerably when several of these particles are active.

The Atari 8-bit family allows different graphics modes and color palettes to be used in different horizontal bands on the screen, by using a simple display list and a type of horizontal blank interrupt. While other games make more extensive use of these techniques, Star Raiders uses them in a relatively simple fashion to combine text displays and graphics; the cockpit display uses a custom character set to display futuristic-looking characters and symbols reminiscent of MICR.

Star Raiders' sounds of engines, shots, explosions, alarms, etc. are synthesized directly using the Atari POKEY sound chip's capabilities. Neubauer was involved in the design of POKEY.

The entire game, code and data, fits into 8K (8192 bytes) of ROM, and requires only 8K of RAM for its working data and display visuals; thus it can run on any Atari 8-bit computer.

Sequels and remakes

Versions of Star Raiders were created for the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, and Atari ST series of computers.

The Atari 2600 version (1982) suffers somewhat from the 2600's weaker graphics and sound capabilities. It shipped with a special keypad controller, the Video Touch Pad, to take the place of the computer keyboard. Although the controller was designed to accept overlays for compatibility with multiple games, Star Raiders was the only game to utilize it. In this version the Zylons are renamed to "Krylons".

The Atari 5200 version is nearly identical to the computer version, but takes advantage of the 5200's analog joystick and makes some minor graphical changes.

Atari also produced a somewhat less successful sequel titled Star Raiders II. Star Raiders II was at one point The Last Starfighter, a licensed tie-in for the movie The Last Starfighter, written for the 8-bit Atari line. When that licensing deal fell through, the completed game was modified into Star Raiders II. It was then ported to the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, and ZX Spectrum.

Neubauer's later game Solaris has some elements in common with Star Raiders. Solaris, which was released seven years after Star Raiders on the less-powerful Atari 2600, was in some respects more visually advanced than the original Atari 800 version of Star Raiders.

That Atari 2600 version of Star Raiders was made available on Microsoft's Game Room service for its Xbox 360 console and for Windows-based PCs on March 24, 2010.

A re-imagining of Star Raiders', developed by Incinerator Studios and published by Atari, was released for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Windows-based PCs on May 11, 2011.

Several of Atari's competitors produced Star Raiders-like games in the early 1980s, such as Activision's Starmaster (1982).

In popular culture

The Doctor Who Audio Dramas (DWAD), a fan-made production based on the BBC program Doctor Who, incorporates several elements from the Star Raiders game and comic series into a number of their episodes. Though most of the stories featuring the Zylons and Star Cruisers are not available to the public, three stories currently are: Mindmask, Terror on Terra, and Target Zylon. The latter two stories also include a heavy Star Trek influence, Star Raiders apparently being set in the world of the United Federation of Planets.

In 1983 DC Comics published a graphic novel inspired by the game; it was the first title of the DC Graphic Novel series. It was written by Elliot S! Maggin and illustrated by José Luis García-López. Early production copies of the Atari 2600 version of the game were accompanied by an Atari Force mini-comic (published by DC Comics). This particular issue was #3 in the series, preceded by mini-comics accompanying the Defender and Berserk games. Two final mini-comics followed with the games Phoenix and Galaxian.