Invasion Orion is a 1979 science fiction strategy video game written and published by Automated Simulations (which would become Epyx in 1983).

For instance, it was a useful strategy to use the tractor beam to push fighters quickly into range of their targets, at "speeds" their own engines could not achieve.

One new addition was the in-game "W" command, which would write out a copy of the current game state in a BUILDER-file format, allowing it to be re-loaded later.

[citation needed] After Starfleet Orion had been completed, the authors, Jon Freeman and Jim Connelly, decided that the original placed too many demands on the players.

Additionally, the game demanded two players who had to take turns typing in their commands on the keyboard, hopefully not peeking to see what the other user was entering.

[citation needed] Both Freeman and Connelly were interested in a new game with what they called "solo play", a single player against a computer opponent.

In order to make up for this and have some sort of challenge, they made the scenarios somewhat one sided, allowing the computer AI to simply charge in and attack with some hope of winning.

[3] In March 1983 Invasion Orion won tenth place in Softline's Dog of the Year awards "for badness in computer games", Atari division, based on reader submissions.