Atari A to Z: The Last Starfighter

Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada.

Any kid who watched the 1984 movie The Last Starfighter longed to hear those words for real — to put the skills they’d learned in video games to the test with real conflict against invading forces!

Unfortunately, Atari’s attempt to cash in on the popularity of the movie didn’t quite make it to market in time, instead finally seeing the light of day in 1986 as the hastily rebranded Star Raiders II. However, the original, fully playable prototype of the game in its original The Last Starfighter format has been well-preserved over the years… so it’s that we’ll be taking a look at in today’s video!

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2 thoughts on “Atari A to Z: The Last Starfighter”

  1. I found it hard to split The Last Starfighter and Star Raiders II… I admittedly played the latter more than the former but do wish the original game was released and we got a REAL Star Raiders sequel instead (which partially exists!). Great to see a full play through and explanation too as I think I was stupidly blowing up my own cities back then. 🙂

    Also remember what it was like here with the user groups and their “libraries”… especially “Behind Jaggi Lines” and “Ballblaster”… I think Lucasfilm developers of the era have said that it was actually Atari themselves who leaked their games which isn’t ideal…

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