Timeline | 1982: River Raid for Atari 2600

River Raid was another great Activision game for the Atari 2600

Following the success of Pitfall! Activision released River Raid also for the Atari 2600. River Raid was an early scrolling shooter and while it didn't reach nearly the commercial success of Pitfall! it was quite the accomplishment for the time.

River Raid had a simple but effective gameplay formula in which the player pilots a jet at the bottom of the screen which they can move left and right and from which they can fire bullets. The camera continually moves upward and the player must destroy other planes, boats on the river below, etc. to advance the game.

A screenshot of River Raid on the Atari 2600

River Raid was a relatively engaging experience for video games at the time and stood up well graphically and gameplay-wise against its contemporaries, but what really set River Raid apart was the sheer size of the game. Tiny by today's standards, River Raid had what was an extensive amount of non-random or repeating terrain which should have been impossible to hold in the limited memory capacity of the ROM chips used for Atari 2600 games. Activision was able to achieve the terrains using an algorithm to create them instead of simply storing them, this algorithm had hard-coded values so it created the same terrain each time but it allowed them to store it in a relatively small area. The enemies movements however were based on a random number generator that helped make them less predictable and provided for great gameplay for the time.

Further Reading

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Raid