Star Wars (1983 video game)

Star Wars
North American arcade flyer showing the upright and cockpit cabinets
Developer(s) Atari, Inc.
Publisher(s) Atari, Inc.
Designer(s) Mike Hally
Composer(s) Earl Vickers
Series Star Wars Edit this on Wikidata
Platform(s) Arcade
Release
Genre(s) Rail shooter
Mode(s) Single player
Cabinet Upright and sit-down cockpit
CPU Motorola 6809
Sound 4x Atari POKEY (music and sound effects)
Texas Instruments TMS5220 (speech synthesis)
Display Vector horizontal

Star Wars is an arcade game designed by Mike Hally[2] and produced by Atari, Inc. in 1983.[3] The game is a first person space combat game using 3D color vector graphics to simulate the attack on the Death Star from the 1977 film Star Wars. It was developed during the Golden Age of Arcade Games and has appeared in lists of the greatest video games of all time.

The game features several digitized samples of voices from the movie, including Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi, James Earl Jones as Darth Vader, Harrison Ford as Han Solo, the mechanized beeps of R2-D2, and the growls of Chewbacca.

Gameplay

Arcade version dogfight (emulated)

Assuming the role of Luke Skywalker ("Red Five"), the player pilots an X-wing fighter from a first-person perspective. The controls consist of a yoke control with four buttons — two trigger style and two in position to be pressed by the thumbs — each of which fired a laser positioned on the four leading edges of the X-Wings.

The player does not have to destroy every enemy in order to advance through the game; instead, the player must survive for a set length of time, either avoiding or destroying enemies and the shots they fire. The player begins with six shields, one of which is lost for every collision with an enemy or projectile. If the player loses all shields and is hit again, the game ends.

Each wave of the game consists of three attack phases, culminating in the destruction of the Death Star.

Phase 1

In the first phase, the player engages in a dogfight with Darth Vader and enemy TIE fighters in outer space near the Death Star. After the TIE fighter waves, when flying towards the Death Star, the yellow grid lines on the Death Star spell out either "MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU" on odd-numbered waves or names of some of the developers on even numbered waves.

Phase 2

In the second phase, the player must fly across the surface of the Death Star to reach its equatorial trench. This section is omitted during the first wave of the game. During the second wave the player is attacked by artillery bunkers, while in the third and subsequent waves laser turrets on towers rise to confront the player. The player is awarded a bonus for destroying every turret.

Phase 3

In the third phase, the player must navigate the trench until finally firing a proton torpedo at the correct time for a direct hit on the exhaust port target. If the player is successful, the Death Star explodes and the player is awarded a bonus shield, to a maximum of six. Should the player fail to hit the exhaust port, a shield is lost and the player must attempt the trench again. If the player manages to destroy the Death Star without firing at anything but the exhaust port, a bonus is awarded for "using the Force."

The game then resets to the first phase. Each successive wave greatly increases the difficulty; TIE Fighters shoot more often, artillery bunkers and laser towers appear in the second phase, and obstacles appear in the trench during the third. Unlike the movie, where the units shoot beams similar to lasers, the enemy units in this game shoot projectiles resembling fireballs, in order to give the player a chance to destroy the shots.[3]

Development

Development on the game started in 1981, under the title "Warp Speed", and was initially headed up by Ed Rotberg (of Battlezone fame).[4] Rotberg left Atari in October 1981, after which Atari signed a licensing agreement with LucasFilm and finished the game.[4]

Ports

Star Wars was converted first by Parker Brothers in 1983 and 1984 to the Atari 2600, Atari 5200, the Atari 8-bit family, ColecoVision, and Commodore 64. The ColecoVision version was programmed by Wendell Brown.[5]

Acorn Electron conversion by Vektor Grafix

The same game was converted again, in 1987 and 1988, for the Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Acorn Electron, BBC Micro and Enterprise 64; the game was also converted again for the Atari 8-bits and the Commodore 64. All conversions were developed by UK-based Vektor Grafix (the Atari 8-bit version by Zeppelin Games being an exception) and were published in Europe by Domark. That same year Broderbund acquired the rights to develop Star Wars games from Lucasfilm. Broderbund published the Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64, and MS-DOS versions of the arcade game in North America in 1988, in addition to republishing the Atari ST and Amiga versions in 1989.

The Amiga and Atari ST allow mouse control and include digitized sound effects. The Macintosh version contains sampled speech from the films, but has no in-game music other than a monophonic theme during the "attract" mode.

Reception

The game was one of the top selling games of 1983, as Atari produced 12,695 total units. COMPUTE! praised the Atari ST version of Star Wars, calling it "amazing, smoothly animated".[6] The MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, and Commodore 64 versions by Broderbund Software were reviewed in 1989 in Dragon #145 by Hartley, Patricia, and Kirk Lesser in "The Role of Computers" column. The reviewers gave the game 3 out of 5 stars.[7]

In 1996, Next Generation listed the arcade version as number 58 on their "Top 100 Games of All Time". Citing "Awesome vector graphics, multiple triggers, a deluxe cabinet with powerful speakers in the back, [and] digitized voices", they ventured that it was "Probably the best licensed game ever."[8] In 2001 it was voted one of the top 100 arcade games of all time by the members of Killer List of Videogames.[9]

Legacy

Star Wars arcade machines can be converted into The Empire Strikes Back via a conversion kit.[3]

This game, along with The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, was also included as an unlockable extra in the Nintendo GameCube game Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike. In the United States and some European countries, customers could get the GameCube version of the game for free when they pre-ordered Rebel Strike.

Records

In 1984 Robert Mruczek scored 300 million points in 49 hours of gameplay (the world record for an individual) and in 2005, Brandon Erickson set a world endurance record of 54 hours on a single credit (with a score of 283 million).[10] In June 1985 Flavio Tozzi, Dave Roberts and Mike Ohren played as a team in turns for five days, two hours and 26 minutes on a single credit to attain the world record score of 1,000,000,012 points. It was featured on Yorkshire Television and was verified in the September 1985 edition of the UK Computer and Video Games magazine. Their efforts raised money for a local charity.[11] The score counter of this game "turns over" at 100 million points.

Because of the fact that a number of skilled players could play indefinitely on the factory settings, it was decided to put the machines on a harder setting for the annual Twin Galaxies International Scoreboard/Guinness Book Masters Tournament, where the player would have six initial shields but no bonus shields, and thus the game would be a test of skill rather than endurance. In the 1986 Tournament, David Palmer scored 31,660,614 points on that setting (in approx. 7 hours), a score which was subsequently published in the Guinness Book of World Records and which remains the world record to this day.[12]

References

  1. ↑ "Star Wars arcade pcb by Atari, Inc. (1983)".
  2. ↑ "Star Wars". arcade-history.com. Retrieved 2014-06-26.
  3. 1 2 3 "Star Wars - Atari (1983)". The International Arcade Museum. Retrieved 2014-06-24.
  4. 1 2 "Army Armed with Quarters!". Next Generation. No. 26. Imagine Media. February 1997. p. 49.
  5. ↑ "Star Wars". colecovision.dk. Retrieved 2014-06-26.
  6. ↑ Plotkin, David (July 1988). "ST Star Wars". Compute!. p. 51. Retrieved 10 November 2013.
  7. ↑ Lesser, Hartley; Lesser, Patricia; Lesser, Kirk (May 1989). "The Role of Computers". Dragon (145): 44–53.
  8. ↑ "Top 100 Games of All Time". Next Generation. No. 21. Imagine Media. September 1996. p. 51.
  9. ↑ "The Top Coin-Operated Videogames of all Times". The International Arcade Museum. Retrieved 2014-06-25.
  10. ↑ "Yale Alumni Magazine: Arts & Culture". Archived from the original on 2006-08-23.
  11. ↑ "Alien Bashing Record" (47). Computer and Video Games. September 1985: 119.
  12. ↑ "1987 Guinness Book of World Records".
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