Star Raiders is the first-person space-combat simulator Doug Neubauer, an Atari employee, wrote for the company's 8-bit computers and published in 1979: the player pilots a ship from a 3D-perspective cockpit, defending star bases from an invasion of alien Zylon ships, switching between the combat view and a galactic map showing the enemy's advance. The entire game's code and data fit in just 8 kilobytes of memory.
It's considered, without exaggeration, the "killer app" that justified buying an Atari 800 computer in those early years, and its influence extends far beyond its own era: it's cited as a direct inspiration for Elite, the Wing Commander saga, and much of the space-combat-simulation genre that came after. Neubauer, in addition, took part in designing Atari's POKEY sound chip.
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