Star Raiders

Star Raiders is a first-person space combat simulator for the Atari 8-bit computer family. It was written by Doug Neubauer, an Atari employee, and released by Atari as a cartridge in 1979. The game is considered a killer application for the platform. It was later ported to the Atari 2600, the Atari 5200 and the Atari ST. The game simulates 3D space battles between the player's ship and an invasion fleet of alien "Cylon" ships. Star Raiders was characterized by its graphics, which offered a forward and backward perspective in addition to various map and long-range scan views, with movement conveyed by a streaming 3D starfield as the player attacked the enemy spaceships. Although there were other games that used the first-person perspective (e.g. Cosmic Conflict from 1978), Star Raiders had much better graphics and more complex gameplay. It inspired imitators in the 1980s as well as later space combat simulations such as Elite, Wing Commander and Star Wars: X-Wing. In 2007, Star Raiders was included in a list of the 10 most important video games of all time compiled by Stanford University's History of Science and Technology Collections.