Star Strike

A deadly trench opens up across the surface of an enemy planet, and your task is to guide your fighter precisely over its mouth and destroy the planet before it launches an attack on Earth. Star Strike is a space shooter for the Intellivision that, as early as the beginning of the 1980s, offered a pseudo-spatial perspective and a cinematically styled mission.

The game puts you in a cockpit from which you look down on the planet's surface as you fly over a defensive trench. You have to hit its strategic points, dodge enemy fighters and keep an eye on the time limit before the planet fires its rocket. This combination of precise navigation, shooting and the pressure of a ticking clock creates a tense and dramatic gameplay loop that differs markedly from the usual arcade shooters of the era.

Star Strike was released for the Intellivision and carries a clear inspiration from the famous Death Star attack scene in the film Star Wars, which electrified the whole world at the time. With this game, Mattel demonstrated its console's ability to create an illusion of depth and movement over a surface, which looked impressive and modern on the hardware of the day.

Culturally, Star Strike captures the moment when video games began to draw inspiration from blockbuster films and tried to bring their epic moments onto the home television screen. The feeling that you decide the fate of an entire planet in the last seconds of a countdown gave the game a weight that simply shooting asteroids never had.

For collectors and retro gamers, Star Strike is an interesting record of the ambitions of the early era. It shows how creators strove to tell a story and evoke atmosphere even with the most basic technical means.

Why play: A space shooter inspired by the attack on the Death Star, with a countdown and dramatic tension. An early, ambitious take on cinematic action on a console.