Games That Time Forgot - River Raid

If there’s one thing we love here at hecklerspray, it’s flying a plane down a river pumping oil tankers so full of bullets that they explode, causing a major-league environmental hotspot that will last for generations.

River Raid is today’s Game That Time Forgot, and that’s precisely what the game involved. And, of all things, this vision of insane violence created by a woman.

Back in 1982, you couldn’t move for games all about blowing stuff up
in space. The original Star Wars trilogy (DVDs) had come out, and everyone
wanted to be Han Solo. And - unless you were a crazy old shotgun-totin’
farmer in the Midwest - the only way you could blast an alien to pieces was by
playing computer games.

Carol Shaw wanted in on all this space-blasting action. She’d
already created popular Atari games, such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Checkers
(or Noughts And Crosses and Draughts, if you’re slightly more
distinguished). But making the leap from creating games based on
ancient boardgames to creating explosion-filled galactic epics proved
to be a hard one for Carol.

Her idea - a vertically scrolling space shoot ‘em up that
gets narrower as the game progresses - was dismissed by Activision as
there were already millions of space games in the world. So what did
Carol do? In a stroke of genius, she coloured in the great empty void
of space blue, called it a river and then changed all the aliens into boats
and helicopters. River Raid was born.

Activision, needless to say, loved it. Vietnam was long finished, so
the thought of blowing up enemy boats in a relentless ruthless attack didn’t grate
as much as it would have done a few years earlier.

River Raid was deceptively easy - to begin with. Shaw kept the basic
premise that the playing area - now a river - got narrower as the game
went on. Normally, you’d think that it wouldn’t matter how narrow the
river got if you were flying a plane above it. But you’d be wrong. For
some reason, either your plane was flying extremely low, or the
riverbanks were unusually tall. Whatever the reason, just one scrape
with the riverbank and you’d die. The same went for enemy boats.

There was one other way to die - running out of fuel. Planes in 1982
must have had pretty pathetic fuel-loads, because it seemed like you had to refill every
couple of hundred metres. If you didn’t fly over the fuel station, or
worse - if you blew it up in a blind rage - you’d fail pretty quickly.

For an Atari 2600 game, the controls were pretty responsive and the graphics were clear and crisp. It may have inadvertently caused an entire generation of kids to become irrationally terrified of flying over boats, but that’s beside the point. River Raid is a classic.

Got an Atari 2600? Buy River Raid from eBay for $0.48 - about 25p

[story by Stuart Heritage]