River Raid

River Raid was designed by the first female game programmer, Carol Shaw. She programmed Video Checkers and 3-D Tic Tac Toe at Atari before making the move to work for Activision. Shaw, who recently attended "the 20th anniversary of the 2600" gathering at Nolan Bushell’s house this past summer, comments on being a female in a male-dominated profession at the time: "I really don’t like to make a distinction - other people always made the distinctions for me. I always just liked being one of the designers. When I first started at Atari, I think they thought that I would make games for girls like interior decorating games or something because there weren’t really any games for girls. But I liked just making games."

When she first started at Activision, she wanted to make a space game, but Activision management told her there were too many space games already. So she made a river game. "Originally, the jet was going to be a boat, but the top part of the boat looked kind of funny so it became a jet. The 2600 itself was the biggest difficulty. It was originally designed for Tank and Pong and games like that. It had 128 bytes of RAM and 4K of ROM. I generated the landscape by a pseudo-random number generator. (Perhaps this is why the background never seems to be the same or repeat itself.) It’s all in assembly language and we spent all of our time just squeezing the code down to fit the system," stated Shaw.

In the game you must fly vertically up the river and avoid and shoot down enemy planes and boats. Bridges must be shot down before proceeding further into the game. Refuel your jet by flying over a fuel barge. You can only fly above the water, and the river becomes narrower as you travel farther up the river.

Carol also designed Happy Trails, a unique puzzle game for the Intellivision system. Too bad a 2600 version of Happy Trails was never made. While at Atari, Carol also programmed Polo, a 2600 game that did not surface until 1996 when Shaw and Atari management allowed the CyberPuNKS to include it on the Stella Gets a New Brain CD.

Carol is now retired, lives in California, and is married to Ralph Merkle, a leading researcher in the field of nanotechnology.

River Raid could very well be the 2600’s most popular "shooter." It was also released for the Atari 5200, 8-bit computer, Mattel Intellivision, and Colecovision.

Back in the 1980s, Activision used to give out embroidered game club patches if you got a high score, took a picture of your TV screen, and mailed it to them. Here is the high score to shoot for:

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