Atari art

Elite or Defender? Elite, isn't it? Duh, not Elite, that's DB's masterpiece. My memory fails me. Defender was on the BBC Micro, weren't it...

UPDATE: Canis Lupus reminds me that:

Defender was the outstanding arcade machine, a side-scrolling shooter written by Eugene Jarvis about 4 years before Elite. There's footage on YouTube of someone playing it, apparently on a disassembled arcade machine, or perhaps an emulator hooked up to the original control panel.

 There was no official version for the Beeb, but they did a rip-off version. The rip-off was called Defender, briefly, until Williams or maybe Atari (I think it'd changed hands by then) brought down the Trademark Smack, and it got renamed Planetoid.

Serene and beautiful, whichever game it's from. Anyone? It's River Raid. Which makes sense, because that's what the series is titled, it wasn't just an arty name. (Thanks Neil!)

Alice Shintani's "Atari Series". Courtesy of Kim P.

Comments

[neil h.]

Elite was the classic 3d wire frame space trading/shooting game on the BBC micro. Defender was the side scrolling shoot em up that was in the arcades first, although I'm pretty sure there was a version on the BBC as well. Clicking through to the site shows that the art is inspired by the game River Raid. Pretty nifty stuff.

[kim]

Defender's also available on XBLA, though the already-impossible arcade control panel layout gets even harder mapped to a controller. Maybe if you don't have finger memory of the arcade machine it'd be ok?

Has to be one of the hardest classic arcade games I ever put money into. That and Sinistar. Run! Run!

I can't seem to find it, but there was a mocked up motivational poster on Retroblast with a picture of Eugene Jarvis with a caption that said "JARVIS: Think you're cool? I made Defender!"

[vruz]

yeah River Raid for Atari 800XL, one of my earliest videogaming memories... in black and white, because colour tvs were for grownups, the b&w tv had just been superseeded and little kids couldn't afford big 33" wooden boxenful of tube.
by Activision indeed...