River Raid
You pilot a fighter jet wedged in a narrow canyon, the fuel relentlessly draining, and ahead of you appears another bridge that must be shot apart. River Raid is one of the titles that defined what a vertically scrolling shooter means, and on the Atari 5200 it brings this tense battle for survival into the living room.
The game mechanic is ingeniously simple and at the same time treacherously addictive. You fly over an endlessly winding river, shooting down tankers, helicopters, and bridges, but every shot and every flight costs fuel. You replenish it by flying over fuel stations, so you constantly balance between aggressive shooting and careful management. This nervy balance between risk and resource turns every flight into a small drama, where even a second of hesitation can mean plunging into the water.
The original River Raid comes from 1982 from the Activision workshop, and its author is programmer Carol Shaw, one of the first women to design games independently in the video game industry. That alone makes the title a piece of history. To make the game work on the limited memory of the consoles of the time, it used a procedurally generated landscape, thanks to which the river seemed far more expansive than the amount of data that fit into the cartridge.
On Atari systems, including the more powerful 5200, River Raid became one of the most-played shooters of its era. In genre terms it foreshadowed later vertical scrolling shooters, and its principle of constant pressure on resources appears in dozens of successors. For many players it remains to this day the benchmark for how to make a simple arcade game that you can't put down.
The magic lies in the instant intelligibility and brutal fairness. There is no story or complex controls here, just you, the river, and the dwindling fuel gauge. It is precisely this purity that is the reason River Raid ages far better than a lot of chattier titles of its time.
Why play: A pure, addictive arcade shooter from pioneer Carol Shaw, where the tension of dwindling fuel keeps you at the screen even after decades.
Game 6 of 41 for Atari 5200
The same title elsewhere (2)
Carol Shaw squeezed a smoothly scrolling canyon, dozens of shades of blue river, and surprisingly responsive single-stick control into the mere eight kilobytes of the Atari 2600 cartridge. The Atari 5200 runs on related but more capable graphics hardware than the 2600, so the picture looks sharper and more colourful, but the console's notoriously imprecise analog joystick, which does not self-centre, makes threading the narrow canyon and hitting bridges noticeably harder than with the classic 2600 stick. Gameplay and content are identical on both, yet because of the controls many players today still prefer the original Atari 2600 version.
