The Real Star Raiders II

New submitter Maury Markowitz writes: Star Raiders was the Atari 8-bit home computer's killer app, inspiring Ted Nelson to claim that "The Atari machine is the most extraordinary computer graphics box ever made, and Star Raiders is its virtuoso demonstration game." It was not until many years later that a sequel, of sorts, was released. This Star Raiders II was nothing at all like the original, as it was originally The Last Starfighter, a licensed tie-in to that was rebranded to avoid the stench of the box-office flop.

Well now, three decades later, Kevin Savetz of the excellent ANTIC podcast has dropped a bomb on the retrogaming community: there was a real Star Raiders II under construction for a long time, but it disappeared as Atari imploded. Kevin tracked down the author, Aric Wilmunder, and convinced him to release it after all these years. You can download the game for the emulator of your choice, and read the manual and backstory on the Internet Archive.

Comments

Flop?!

[crankyspice]

The Last Starfighter ...[a] box-office flop

Say what? “The Last Starfighter was a financial success, earning over $28 million on an estimated budget of $15 million.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Starfighter

It's also reasonably well ranked, and spawned a Broadway musical, etc., so I don't see what 'stench' there'd be. Citation needed.

I suspect (a) Atari had plans for a real Last Starfighter game, but in 1984 tech would have been too expensive; (b) this game was originally ‘Orbiter’ and rebranded mid-development to capitalize on the Last Starfighter film; and (c) because gameplay would have been nothing like the game in the movie, and the game wasn't ready until 1985ish anyway (when any boost from associating with The Last Starfighter would probably have been negligible, especially given the probable backlash of the game having little to do with the movie - c.f. E.T. (which Atari was still stinging from)...

Re:Flop?!

[Purity Of Essence]

The Last Starfighter game built from the 8-bit Orbiter game follows the film / game-within-the-film pretty closely. Obviously an Atari 800 couldn't hope to reproduce it visually but it is an excellent tie-in in terms of theme and play. It was leaked in the 80s and I played the hell out of it.

Atari's coin-op division also developed a Last Starfighter game that was very faithful to the game shown in the film. It was also unreleased.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Why neither game was released remains a matter of speculation.

Re:Flop?!

[savetz]

The story of the Last Straighter computer game (which was renamed Star Raiders II, but is NOT the lost Star Raiders II referred to in this post) is told in this interview with its programmer: http://ataripodcast.libsyn.com...

It does now :)

[rsilvergun]

See here. The amount of effort that went into this is crazy amazing.