Viewed from a top-down perspective, the player flies a fighter jet over the River of No Return in a raidbehind enemy lines. The player's jet can only move left and right—it cannot maneuver up and down the screen—but it can accelerate and decelerate. The player's jet crashes if it collides with the riverbank or an enemy craft, or if the jet runs out of fuel. Assuming fuel can be replenished, and if the player evades damage, gameplay is essentially unlimited. The player scores points for shooting enemy tankers, helicopters, fuel depots, jets, and bridges. The jet refuels when it flies over a fuel depot. A bridge marks the end of a game level. Non-Atari 2600 ports of the game add hot air balloons that are worth 60 points when shot as well as tanks along the sides of the river that shoot at the player's jet. Destroying bridges also serve as the game's checkpoints. If the player crashes the plane they will start their next jet at the last destroyed bridge.
Development
For its time, River Raid provided an inordinate amount of non-random, repeating terrain despite constrictive computer memory limits. The gameprogram does not actually store the sequence of terrain and other objects. Instead, a procedural generationalgorithm manifests them by employing a linear feedback shift register with a hard-coded vector. Because this starting value is hard-coded, the algorithm generates the same game world every time the program executes. The enemy crafts' AI, however, relies on a random number generator to make enemy movement less predictable.
Reception
InfoWorld in 1983 stated that River Raid might be the best Atari 8-bit game of the year, "more challenging than any VCS version" and superior to others like Caverns of Mars. Antic in 1984 said that the Atari 8-bit version was identical to the 2600 original, but with slightly "spiffed up... game visuals". The Deseret News in 1984 called River Raid "one of the most playable and entertaining of all war games". The newspaper gave the ColecoVision version four stars, recommending it to all console owners and describing it as "a definite winner all the way". The game received the award for "1984 Best Action Videogame" and a Certificate of Merit in the category of "1984 Best Computer Action Game" at the 5th annual Arkie Awards, where the judges described it as "provid the brand of non-stop excitement the blast brigaders adore". River Raid was the first video game to be banned for minors in West Germany by the Federal Department for Writings Harmful to Young Persons.
Legacy
In 1996, Next Generation listed the Atari 2600 version as number 81 on their "Top 100 Games of All Time", commenting that, "Nostalgia aside, the 2600 sucks.... But this game is still great, for one main reason: Level design." Activision published the relatively obscure River Raid II for the Atari 2600 in 1988. This sequel, programmed by David Lubar based on a concept by Dan Kitchen, has similar gameplay, but with a different landscape and increased difficulty. In 1995 River Raid was published for Microsoft Windows as part of Activision's Atari 2600 Action Pack.
