EXTROPIA’S RETRO-GAMING: ‘STAR WARS’.
Atari’s Star Wars (which hit the arcades in 1983) was not always meant to be Star Wars. Originally, the game had been a space-based shooter called ‘Warp Speed’. Programmed by Ed Rotberg (the man behind such games as ‘Battlezone’) Warp Speed cast the player in the role of a space pilot leading an attack on a well-armed fortress.
You might have noticed that such a premise does sound rather like the climax fo ‘A New Hope’. I can only assume that folks at Atari noticed this similarity too, because a licensing deal was struck and ‘Warp Speed’ was transformed into ‘Star Wars’. Out went Rotberg’s ships and in came TIE fighters. The armoured space fortress became the Death Star, and the game featured spoken dialogue from the movie.
All of this changed ‘Warp Speed’ into an arcade shooter whose attraction was obvious the moment you saw it. In fact, you didn’t even need to see it. It was enough just to hear ‘Your all clear kid, now let’s blow this thing and go home’ to know this was an arcade with at least one game definitely worth checking out.
Once you found it, was it worth playing? Definitely, yes. To my mind, this remains one of the best Star Wars games. Gameplay was, it was very simple. The game recreated the famous assault on the Death Star. There were three stages. In stage one you had to defend yourself against an assault from TIE fighters in a space-based battle, with the Death Star looming in the background. Should you survive this stage, you flew to the Death Star and stage two had you flying over its surface, attempting to take out its defence towers while avoiding laser blasts. After that there came a recreation of the famous flight down the trench. In later levels this became more like the attack on Return Of The Jedi, because there were all obstacles to avoid as you sped toward your final target.
Visually, the game looked great. It featured the same vector graphics style that had previously been seen in games like ‘Battlezone’, but it improved upon these earlier titles by using a new X-Y generator that created colour lines. The result was a game that positively fizzled with colour and ran really smoothly. It looked great and sounded the part two, littered as its as with speech taken from the movie.
‘Star Wars’ would eventually be converted to home computers. The Amiga version was pretty much a perfect conversion. Having said that, no emulation could really compete with the arcade experience of climbing into a cabinet as though you had entered an X-wing, gripping the custom-built controller and imagining you were Red Five himself, as you took the fight to the Empire with all those famous sights and sounds assaulting your senses.
This was one of those games which, if an arcade had it, I would have to have a go. I believe it would still hold up as one of the best attempts to recreate a famous sequence from a beloved movie.
Thanks to Atari for the images