Douglas Neubauer, the same programmer behind Star Raiders, built with "Solaris" an experience that combined space combat, a navigable galactic map with sixteen solar systems, and a sprite scale that seemed impossible for 1977 hardware, with ships that grow and shrink on screen creating a sense of depth unusual for the console. It came out in 1986, in the home stretch of the 2600's commercial life, when few still expected that kind of technical ambition.
It's still rightly cited as one of the best and most impressive games ever made for the Atari 2600, the definitive proof of how much could be squeezed out of hardware that was already considered obsolete on paper almost a decade earlier.
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