In the early 1980s, a lot of kids were fans of Star Wars. A lot of kids were also fans of video games. So what would be better than to bring the two together, Star Wars and video games?Well, early on there weren't any actual Star Wars video games. What did we do? We played Star Strike on the Intellivision home video game system.
In Star Strike, you controlled a ship flying along a trench of a giant space station. Sounds kind of like the space battle scenes in Star Wars, right? That was intentional, I'm sure. While flying your craft, you also got to shoot an enemy alien spaceships while avoiding being blown to bits by them. There was sort of a timer to this game because you had to defeat all the enemy ships before the space station lined up with your planet and blew it to smithereens. Again, very Death Star sounding.
It was also a lot of fun.
The graphics were pretty solid for the time, but then the Intellivision was considered superior in graphics to the king of home video games of the day, the Atari 2600. The gameplay was pretty solid too; some players gripe about the Intellivision controls, a keypad with a direction disc, but I always found it easy to use. The sounds were fair, but keep in mind this was still relatively early on in the development of video games and sound often wasn't utilized to its full potential; and often that full potential was actually pretty low considering the restraints of the systems back then.
Star Strike has always been one of my favorite Intellivision games, being quite addictive for me. I spent hours and hours playing it, and likely will again someday.
And hey, since the Christmas shopping season is upon us, don't forget an Intellivision and maybe the Star Strike game for your favorite retro gaming pal.
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