Atari A to Z: Laser Hawk

Horizontally scrolling shooters are perhaps most commonly associated with the 16-bit Japanese consoles, but there were some great ones on offer on earlier home computers.

One such example was Laser Hawk from Red Rat Software, developed by Kiwi programmer Andrew Bradfield with graphics by Harvey Kong Tin. This was an enjoyable, speedy, helicopter-based horizontal scroller with a cheeky line in fanboy-baiting — the structures you had to destroy at the end of each level all bore an uncanny resemblance to rival, non-Atari computer manufacturers’ logos!

It’s a game that I greatly enjoyed revisiting, and was very pleasantly surprised to discover still plays rather well today. Give it a shot!

Find a full archive of all the Atari A to Z videos on the official site.

4 thoughts on “Atari A to Z: Laser Hawk”

  1. Great post and a cool game too! I’m embarrassed to admit I was one of those system fanboys at the time… I made a game in the ST version of Shoot Em Up Construction Kit that let you shoot Commodore and Apple logos… 🙂

    1. Oh, neat. I always wanted to try SEUCK back in the day but never had the chance. I made (what I thought was) a pretty cool “one on one shoot ’em up” in STOS Basic though! It was called Zapp, and saw you flying your bright blue, distinctly triangular spacecraft in endless sorties against the evil Drangulo forces.

    1. STOS was super-cool, but it calling itself “The Game Creator” kind of made it sound a bit more straightforward than it actually was! You still had to program your games, though as variations on BASIC go, it was pretty intuitive and had some great graphics, sprite, music and sound-handling commands.

      It also had a ton of great extensions — STOS Maestro for sampled sounds, STOS 3D for polygonal 3D, STOS Compiler for creating super-speedy machine code versions of your games, and tons and TONS of third-party add-ons and accessories.

Share your thoughts. Be nice!

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.