River Raid

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Screenshot of "River Raid" (Atari 2600)

River Raid is a scrolling shooter videogame and was released in 1982 by Activision for the Atari 2600, and later the Atari 8-bit, C64, ZX Spectrum,and MSX. The player controls an airplane in a top-down view over a river and gets points for shooting down enemy planes, helicopters, ships and balloons. By flying over fuel-stations, the plane's tank can be refilled. The player can shift side to side and change the speed of his plane. Sections of the river are marked by bridges. The game was programmed by Carol Shaw, one of the Activision programmers who had previously worked at Atari and then Tandem Computers and who is said to be the first female video game designer.

[edit] German controversy

River Raid was especially popular in Germany, as it was the first videogame to be put on the Index by the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons in German), along with the little known German racing game Speed Racer for the Commodore 64.

In the explanatory statement for indexation on December 19th 1984 it is written: "Minors should think as an uncompromising fighter and destroyer (...). A paramilitaristic education takes place in the childhood (...). With older minors, playing leads (...) to physical cramps, anger, aggressiveness, erratic thinking (...) and headaches." (BPjS-Aktuell Heft 2/84)

River Raid remained indexed as harmful to minors until 2002 when a publisher successfully lobbied to remove the game from the index in order to rerelease it in the Activision Anthology for the PlayStation 2. In a sign of how views had changed since 1984, the anthology was rated "Free for all ages" by the "Unterhaltungssoftware Selbstkontrolle".

[edit] Trivia

River Raid was followed by a sequel, River Raid II, programmed by David Lubar in 1988. It provided similar gameplay but with different landscapes and increased difficulty. Today, it is not as well remembered as the original, possibly because it was released during the Atari 2600's downfall.
The game is notable for providing a gigantic amount of fixed, non-random, non-repeating terrain despite tight limitations of available memory on its hardware platforms. The game program does not actually store the sequences of enemies and other objects; they are dynamically generated algorithmically during gameplay using a linear feedback shift register with a fixed starting seed.