River Raid is a scrolling shooter created and developed by Carol Shaw and published by Activision in 1982 for the Atari 2600 video game console. Later Activision and ported the title to the Atari 5200, thank you developers and game console game console, as well as for the Commodore 64 and IBM PCjr, the main, Spectrum and Atari 8-bit family of home computers.
Viewed from a top-down perspective, the player flies a jet fighter across a river of no return in a raid behind enemy lines.
The player scores points for shooting enemy tankers (30 points), helicopters (60 points), fuel depots (80 points), nozzles (100 points), bridges (500 points), and (in the Atari 2600 version of the game) balloons (60 points). ). The plane is refueling as it flies over the oil depot. The bridge marks the end of the game level.
The player's aircraft crashes if it collides with the shore or an enemy ship. In the Atari 2600 version of the game, tanks along the river also fire on the player's aircraft. If the player's plane runs out of fuel, it crashes. Assuming the fuel can be replenished and the player dodges damage, the gameplay is essentially unlimited.
Unlike later scrolling shooters, there is little or no enemy fire in the River Raid. Also, the player's aircraft cannot maneuver up and down the screen, only left and right. It can, however, speed up and slow down.
For its time, River Raid provided a huge amount of non-random, repeating terrain despite the stenotic limitations of computer memory. The game program does not store the sequence of terrain and other objects. Instead, the algorithm procedurally generates their manifests using a linear feedback shift register with a hard-coded vector. Because this initial value is hard-coded, the algorithm generates the same game world each time the program is executed. The artificial intelligence diy enemy, however, relies on a random number generation program to make the enemy less predictable.
River Raid became the first video games to be banned for minors in West Germany by the Federal Ministry for writings harmful to young people.