Star Wars for Atari
What
was your first Star Wars video game?
Was it one of the Knights of the Old
Republic series? Maybe one of the Lego games? Or, if you’re really
old-school, was it one of the Super Star
Wars line?
For
many who were around back at the dawn of video games, your first experience
with Star Wars is the classic one for
both Atari and in the arcades known simply as “Star Wars”. While it isn’t the first Star Wars game ever made like some say (that honour goes to the
infamous Empire Strikes Back game for
the Atari 2600 and the Intellivision), it’s made a lasting impact as one of the
most famous games not only in the Star
Wars franchise, but in all of gaming history.
I’ve
talked about it before in my Ten Great Star Wars Commercials article, but the
ad for this game is so ridiculous that it’s worth looking at it again here. If
you haven’t seen it, behold the greatest commercial ever made:
Pretty
hard not to get excited about a game that will literally make your head
explode, right? So how is it really?
Honestly,
while at this point the graphics have aged about as well as a slice of cheese
in the Orlando summer sun, the game is still a pretty fun shooting gallery with
some great little Star Wars stuff
added on.
The
game is broken up into three levels: a dogfight with some TIE Fighters, an attack
on the surface of the Death Star, and of course the classic trench run. The
dogfight pits you against Darth Vader and a few other fighters (you can tell
it’s Vader because he’s dark blue instead of grey), as you shoot them down and
destroy their projectiles before they hit you. It’s nothing too difficult,
especially since their shots move significantly slower than yours. The next
level is spent shooting down towers and avoiding more projectiles, but this one
is mostly to practice dodging for what comes next: the trench run.
This
level still holds up as one of the most impressive things you can see on the
Atari. It’s very fast paced, with lots of shots to avoid, quick decisions to
make, and, on the higher levels, plenty of obstacles to duck and weave around.
It can be a bit of a snooze early on as there are points where nothing is
happening (as the game doesn’t load in the laser gates you have to avoid until
higher levels), but it’s still some of the best gameplay 1983 had to offer.
Once you’ve survived
the time limit in each level, you move on to the next one. It’s all incredibly
simple, and you can successfully destroy the Death Star in just a couple of
minutes if you really know what you’re doing. Then, once you’ve succeeded, you
get to do it all over again on a higher difficulty.
I was honestly
expecting Star Wars Atari to be
little more than a mishmash of polygons and pixels with no rhyme or reason like
other games on the system at the time, like the much maligned E.T. game. Instead, I was very pleased
to find that this game holds up remarkably well, and you can definitely see how
this game inspired contemporary Star Wars
arcade games like Star Wars: Battle
Pod. If you want to try it out for yourself it’s very easy to find online,
and there are even a few official Star
Wars games that feature it as a special unlockable minigame. I don’t know
if any of the actual arcade cabinets still exist, but from what I’ve heard that
version is significantly better than any of the home console versions of the
game, so if you ever stumble across one you should definitely check it out. The
original Star Wars classic game
definitely proved that the biggest franchise in entertainment was going to be a
force to be reckoned with in gaming.
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