Star Raiders II

Star Raiders II has one of the strangest origin stories in games. It was never meant to be a Star Raiders sequel at all — it began as a licensed tie-in to the 1984 film The Last Starfighter, in which an arcade cabinet of the same name drives the plot. Atari 5200 and Atari 8-bit versions were finished in 1984 but never released. When the licence fell through, Atari reworked the game, changed several elements and shipped it in 1986 as Star Raiders II. ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 conversions followed under licence from Electric Dreams Software in 1987 — and that is the version most European players encountered.

The original Star Raiders from 1979 was the killer app for Atari's 8-bit machines: cockpit space combat backed by a galactic map tracking an enemy invasion. The sequel took only part of that. It plays differently — more arcade-driven, weighted towards direct action, with sections over planetary surfaces that are leftovers from the film licence.

That is precisely why it never enjoyed the reception the original did. Players expected a deeper simulation and got a brisker but shallower shooter. Taken on its own it is not bad: it has pace, graphics that read clearly by the standards of the day, and a decent sense of combat weight.

An interesting footnote: in 2015 it emerged that a genuine sequel to Star Raiders, also called Star Raiders II, had been in development by Atari programmer Aric Wilmunder and was close to finished when he was laid off during the company's mass redundancies in early 1984. The real sequel never shipped, and the name went to a game that has nothing to do with it.