River Raid II

 

David Lubar programmed River Raid II, but is not listed in the instruction manual. Instead, Dan Kitchen is credited. Lubar was a freelance programmer for the 2600. One day he dropped by the offices of Absolute Entertainment in NJ for some work on Atari 2600 games, since he loved to program for the Atari VCS. Activision had recently contracted Absolute to produce a new product for them, and Absolute decided Lubar was the man for the job. David Lubar was then given the almost impossible task of creating a sequel to the top-selling game River Raid. Although he had his apprehensions, he was able to produce a game with all the best elements of the original...and then some. "I knew that River Raid was such a legendary game that it would be difficult to fill the shoes I was given. All I was told was to make a River Raid with the plane taking off a carrier. Given the basic concept, Dan Kitchen and I would throw ideas back and forth." River Raid II was later born from this collaborative effort.

One of the technical achievements in this game was the use of sprites. "We really pushed the machine close to its limits in trying to get the largest number of objects, variety of objects and variety of colors of the objects all on the screen at once." The results are evident in the game, which is packed full of air, sea and ground targets for the player to annihilate.

David Lubar’s first game was Worm War I (by Fox / Sirius) , which he created in 1982. It was the first two-player cooperative game, and also the first to implement a game pause feature (by means of the black and white/color switch). He went on to design other Atari 2600 games such as The Challenge of Nexar, Fantastic Voyage, Space Master X-7, Flash Gordon (all by Fox), Bumper Bash (by Spectravideo - reviewed in issue 46), Sentinel (the light gun game by Atari - reviewed in issue 5), and My Golf ( the PAL golf game by HES - reviewed in issue 6). He also programmed Home Alone for the Nintendo Gameboy, Swamp Thing for the NES, and Super Battletank II and Home Improvement - both for the Super NES. Lubar also wrote a computer humor book entitled It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature, which contains various quotes that computer users are sure to enjoy.

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. However, there was no high score patch awarded for River Raid II.

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