Stellar 7

Stellar 7 is listed with 1983 and Penguin Software as publisher, on the Commodore 64. The year matches the game's original release for the eight-bit machines of the day; the C64 version arrived later, so read the date as the birth of the title rather than of this particular conversion.

It is a one-player game and the record marks it as side-view. In practice it is a tank shooter seen from the vehicle, with the scene drawn in wireframe, meaning nothing but lines forming the outlines of enemies and terrain.

In 1983 wireframe was the only workable route to a three-dimensional scene on a home computer. Filled polygons could not be computed quickly enough, whereas a few hundred line segments could, and players learned to read space from outlines as readily as from solid shapes.

Play rests on rotating the turret, judging distance and using the radar, since enemies frequently appear outside the field of view. The tension comes from what cannot be seen, which in this graphical generation was often more effective than detail would have been.

Penguin Software leaned towards smaller, technically adventurous titles rather than mass-market fare, and this game fits that profile. A three-dimensional scene was something very few programmers could deliver in 1983, and players read it as a demonstration of what a machine could do. The Commodore 64 conversion then gained better sound and colour than the original version, since those were exactly the areas where the C64 led its competition.

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