Star Raiders is a space combat simulator video game created by Doug Neubauer and published in 1980 by Atari, Inc.

The player assumes the role of a starship fighter pilot, who must protect starbases from invading forces called Zylons.

Star Raiders is a space combat simulator set during a galactic war between the Atarian Federation and the Zylon Empire.

[1][2] The player assumes the role of the captain of the Elite Atarian Starship fleet, fighting the Zylons before they eliminate humanity.

In action sequences, the player will sometimes avoid or destroy asteroids before they damage their starship, while battling enemy ships using photon torpedoes.

[4] Six types of equipment can be damaged in action, which is tracked using the acronym PESCLR (for photon torpedoes, engines, shields, computer, long-range scan, and radio).

[13] National canceled its home computer projects, leading Neubauer to move to Atari, where design manager Richard Simone hired him.

[6][14] During a period where Atari had fewer hardware design needs, supervisor Jay Miner allowed Neubauer to work on software that eventually developed into Star Raiders.

Neubauer initially designed the hyper warp system to involve calculations inspired by Isaac Asimov's The Stars, Like Dust (1951), but decided to abandon it as "a dumb idea in terms of gameplay for an action game".

Due to the limited memory in the ROM cartridge, Neubauer also abandoned a feature that would allow players to dock at star bases.

Neubauer did not want a number-score system and instead applied a military ranking with humorous ratings to poorly performing players.

[19] He stated the game had "a lot of ugly spaghetti code" so Star Raiders could run on less-expensive Atari 400 computers and fit on an eight-kilobyte cartridge.

[27] This port of the game included additional content such as overlays that show player status and rumble effects when entering hyperspace.

[33] Cole noted difficulty in the game, stating in more-difficult modes if the ship is damaged it is nearly impossible to locate a base for repairs.

[9] Henry Allen echoed the praise in The Washington Post, saying Star Raiders is like "the best possible combination of a shooting gallery and a planetarium".

The author praised the comprehensiveness of its simulation of a one-man combat spacecraft, with plausible equipment, communications, vehicle damage, and flight.

[40] In the March 1983 issue of Softline, readers voted for Star Raiders as the best program for Atari computers, with 45% more ballots than the second-place contender Jawbreaker (1981).

[20] Tim Onosko of The Capital Times wrote that the Atari 2600 version was poorly made with inadequate graphics, stating Activision's similar game Starmaster was superior.

[44] In 1995, Flux magazine ranked the original computer version of Star Raiders 46th on its list of "Top 100 Video Games".

[44] A 16-bit version of Star Raiders was released for the Atari ST computers; according to Bevan, the controls feel "floaty", low-quality graphics, and the game was slower-paced than the original.

[13] In 2007, Henry Lowood, the curator of the History of Science and Technology Collections at Stanford University, created a project to preserve video games.

[15] Neubauer explained that Solaris was not a sequel, and that he preferred Star Raiders for its gameplay, cockpit view, and explosion graphics.