October '87


"Your Quest...to destroy the enemy Battlestar that threatens all other known life forms!!"
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"In 3D Starfighter you play a special agent whose mission is to deliver the CHAOS weapon (Complete Hostile Alien Obliteration System) to the scientists of a distant planet overrun by hostile aliens. The game itself is a 3D shoot-'em-up where you must shoot the rapidly approaching alien ships using a set of crosshairs before they crash into you and drain your shields."
What the press said
After producing the complex Professional Ski Simulator we decided it was time to write a more simplistic arcade game. We remembered seeing the vector graphic game Tail Gunner years earlier and saw how well it captured the atmosphere and action of the classic Star Wars dog fight in space and wondered if we could do an arcade game like this with waves of enemies more like a traditional arcade game.
We couldn’t do 3D graphics but had seen how Sega’s Space Harrier, a remarkable popular game, had a player flying across a landscape shooting oncoming enemies in what was supposedly 3D graphics, but were just different size sprites. We felt we could use this method to produce the arcade-style game that we were looking for, plus it would also be very quick and easy to make.
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The results were indeed quick, taking around 2 weeks to write, but the results weren’t as satisfying as we hoped. We couldn’t see how to make a massive improvement in the game and decided to release it since it was to be priced at £1.99 and we still felt this represented enough value for money.
