This week I’m going to discuss one of the earliest additions to my library of 2600 titles, a nifty little space combat simulator released by Activision in 1982. I am, of course, referring to…

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(You’re welcome, Chris.)

Starmaster was an unexpected and unsolicited gift from my maternal grandfather, the man who gave my brother and me our Sears-brand VCS clone in the first place.

I have no idea why he chose that particular game as a vector for grandparental overindulgence (and as he’s been dead for two decades, I can’t ask him), but the game ended up becoming an enduring favorite and one of the few 2600 games I still return to with any frequency.

As I said above, Starmaster is a space combat sim, shamelessly “inspired” by Atari’s own Star Raiders. Players in both games are tasked with hunting down and destroying the squadrons of alien ships that have invaded your peaceful corner of the galaxy. Where Star Raiders‘ pack-in keypad controller and complicated control scheme betrayed the title’s computer gaming roots, Starmaster managed to streamline the action and controls into a visually superior, console-friendly package.

The action alternates navigating a tactical map depicting the current location of enemy units and an in-cockpit view for the actual dogfighting. The 2600 console’s color/B&W display toggle (which had become an anachronism at the time of the game’s release) was used to switch between the two views…much to the consternation of any poor player who accidentally flipped the reset switch in haste.

The player warps from sector to sector, dodging stray asteroids and enemy fire while attemping to ensure the safety of the four friendly starbases scattered across the map. The actual dogfighting is crude by contemporary standards, as it simply involves wrestling the attacking ships (which are kind — or stupid — enough to attack one-on-one rather than gang up to blast you into atoms) into the ship’s crosshairs while dodging the massive orange ovals used to represent enemy fire.

Damage is taken from directly from the same pool of “energy” that powers the ship’s lasers and warp drive, which adds a rudimentary (yet effective) resource management to the proceedings. While refuelling and repairs to ship components (tactical map radar, warp power consumption, shields) can be performed by docking with a starbase, the player’s total score takes a penalty for doing so.

This emphasis on skill and efficiency — and the resulting motivation to push one’s luck to the brink by taking on a trio of enemies with a near-empty tank — is what got me hooked on Starmaster.

The fact that game had an actual end, rather than a perpetually looping series of screens and enemies, also factored into my love for it. It didn’t so much have a narrative as an ideal framework from which a geeky ten year old could drape his own narrative (and draw crude schematics for his imaginary kickass spaceship in his fourth grade workbook).

Overwhelming odds, frustrating setbacks, a decisive turning point, and then the satisfaction of a hard-won victory — all marked by an interactivity between the game and the player’s imagination that has been all but lost with the advent of highly-scripted and plotted titles. (I did feel a touch of the ol’ wonder while playing Fable II and Fallout 3, but as detailwork in very realized settings.)

Somewhere in my collection of childhood ephemera exists a grainy Polaroid of my near-perfect score on Starmaster’s highest difficulty level, an accomplishment that earned me this…or it would have, if I had ever gotten around to mailing the photo to Activision.

Related posts:

  1. Growing Up 2600: Light from a dead star
  2. Growing Up 2600: Foggy with a chance of death
  3. Growing Up 2600: Making this up as I go