Starglider 2 – “Stardrive Activated”

11 years before the release of Starwing/Star Fox, and 44 years before Argonaut Games signed up to an arms dealer’s retrogaming side project, Argonaut was formed in 1982 by Jez San. Jez (short for Jeremy) San grew up in north west London. When he was 12 years old his father, who handily ran an import-export business, gave him an American TRS-80 computer. Jez quickly started writing programs for it, including one to allow its games to be played with an Atari controller. He then gained further knowledge by hanging out at a nearby computer shop with other (mostly older) enthusiasts, in much the same way as, during the same period, Matthew Smith in Liverpool and Satoru Iwata in Tokyo.

By 1982, Jez San had switched to a BBC Micro and got a summer job with games company Silversoft. He wrote a conversion of Sega’s 3D arcade space shooter Tac/Scan, which didn’t get released but showed an early interest in 3D and space which would serve him well. He experimented with various other bits of programming and hacking, and then set up Argonaut (chosen for the implied Jason pun on his name) to make it less obvious he was one teenager working in his bedroom. He found some security weaknesses in BT’s early electronic message service Telecom Gold, and persuaded them to pay Argonaut £500 for a report on its (his) findings. He proceeded to do something similar with Acorn.

Jez San also reports his hacking as having extended to live TV. In 2015 he told Retro Gamer that he had been responsible for the bit in the BBC’s 1983 Micro Live when its presenter logged into a message system and was unexpectedly greeted by a hacking poem, although only San’s friends actually attached their names to it. San combined his enthusiasm for hacking and games into becoming an enthusiastic player of the original online Multi User Dungeon, or MUD, dialling into Essex University where it was based and shortcutting his way to a high rank. As a chronicler of the game wrote in 1985, “after several months of glorious bloodletting, and suitably impressive telephone bills, this precocious 17-year-old (as he was then) made it up to wiz”.

When it came to San making his own games, the first one to be published was Skyline Attack for the Commodore 64 in 1984. He wrote a couple of computer-related books for Century Communications, then got to make a game for their software arm. San worked on it with his friend Fouad Katan, plus Dan Emmett on graphics. Skyline Attack is a Defender-like 2D shooter, where the action plays out above London and Paris. “The graphics are excellent, especially the skylines of the cities you fly over, which scroll very smoothly.” wrote Commodore User. “The game is challenging and the pace is fast and furious”.

San and Katan also came up with software to let them carry out development for the Commodore 64 on the BBC Micro. Thanks to a shared agent, Jacqui Lyons, this came to the attention of Elite publishers Firebird, and made its way to Elite developers David Brabel and Ian Bell to use as part of converting their game from BBC Micro to Commodore 64. Elite’s C64 manual includes in its credits “Technical Assistance by Jeremy Sans”.

As a BBC Micro enthusiast, Jez San was presumably well aware of Elite long before that. He also seems to have shared its makers’ enthusiasm for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, since in MUD he sometimes went by Zaphod, the name of one of its characters. Neither was the central inspiration for the 3D space game he made next, though. That was Star Wars, Atari’s 1983 wireframe 3D arcade machine version of the film. It let players zap tie fighters and attack the Death Star, and was designed by Mike Hally. Hally had also worked on Gravitar, the game that around the same time inspired another Jeremy, Jeremy C. Smith, to make Thrust.

Jez San, showing a characteristic willingness to think big and give it a go, attempted to negotiate the rights to make home computer versions of Star Wars. When he found that he wasn’t persuasive enough to achieve that, he thought “well, I’m going to do my own 3D game, and it’s going to be better”. He got more ambitious in the process, deciding to open it out into something with greater freedom to move around. He also chose to make his game for the new 16-bit computers, developing initially on an Apple Mac and managing to get himself early releases of the Atari ST and Commodore’s Amiga. As part of providing support for Elite, he had agreed for Firebird to release his game. They would do so under their new Rainbird label, and he gave it a different Star Noun name: Starglider.

Starglider does let you roam around its wireframe world, as well as adding complications like refuelling. You fight an alien invasion, as described in an included novella, including some very The Empire Strikes Back walking vehicles. It’s not a world with that intricate details visible at once, but moving through it was still technically impressive. So too was the game’s sound, with Jez San working out a way to do sampled speech. Clare Edgeley, a journalist-turned-Telecomsoft-publicist whose reviews I have quoted in numerous posts, provided the voice that gives notices like “damage alert”. There is also even some singing in Dave Lowe’s title screen music.

The first release of Starglider was in 1986 on the Atari ST. That was the right choice since it was initially the more successful of the new 16-bit computers, even if the Amiga would eventually overtake it. A quote from Gremlin’s Stuart Gregg on why they didn’t make an Amiga version of Gauntlet is indicative of how things were in 1986: “because the [cheaper] Amiga 500 was only available in such small numbers at the time. The Amiga 1000 was out of reach for most people.”

Atari ST User’s review, by Andrew Bennett, was full of praise for Starglider and the freedoms it offered. “With some arcade-type games the danger is that you can explore them fully during a demonstration in a shop without realising it. Then, when you get the game home, you find there’s nothing left to do. This won’t happen with Starglider: the further you get into it, the more it offers you. It definitely gets my vote for Atari ST User game of 1986”. ACE didn’t publish their first issue until well after its first release, but in their mini reviews of existing games they described it as offering a “standard issue scenario, but an outstanding game”.

In 1987, Solid Image converted Starglider to the Commodore 64, and Realtime Games, who had made 3D Tank Duel (as featured on Soft Aid) wrote Spectrum and Amstrad versions. Realtime Games did so well with it that they and Rainbird agreed they should go into making their own 3D games for the 16-bit computers. They did so with #8 hit Carrier Command in 1988.

The 8-bit versions of Starglider were followed by Jez San and his team’s own Amiga conversion. That one ended up being used for competition sections on ITV show Get Fresh, although sadly I can only find videos with Xenon being played instead. Amiga Starglider 2 also got more good reviews. Commodore User’s Francis Jago wrote that “what Jeremy San has managed to do is tame the blitter, a dedicated chip that allows the computer to move data around the screen incredibly quickly” and “Starglider is a game that, unlike most current Amiga games, will be remembered in four years time”.

Well before those four years were up, in 1988, Argonaut and Rainbird released a sequel. That speed of production was made possible not just by the foundations already laid, but by many more people working on it. As recorded in Britsoft: An Oral History, Jez San later recounted that “Rainbird sold probably about 200,000 copies of Starglider”, and he took his royalties of £2 a copy and “put all of it into the company and hired a team”. Argonaut numbered ten people by the time of Starglider 2, and had moved into a proper office of its own. At the time, San said, it “seemed maybe not the wisest move, but I thought that was the way things were going. I thought that one great programmer couldn’t make a whole computer game for very long”. The decision soon paid off.

Jez San told The One in 1988 that “As far as I’m concerned, Starglider wasn’t finished. I really wanted to continue with it […] but suddenly Rainbird wanted the game for release”. With more time and resources, Starglider 2 was much more ambitious in several ways. One was switching out wireframe graphics for a solid shaded look that gave the world a whole lot more definition. Argonaut also gave more definition and structure to the narrative, building in a set of items to find as part of building up to destroying a Death Star-like station. They added the option for a third person view from outside your ship as well as the cockpit view. Most impressive of all was going from everything taking place on a single planet to a full solar system.

Playing Starglider 2 on the Atari ST, flying along the surface, angling upwards and speeding up until you fairly seamlessly leave the planet behind and head into space is a pretty awesome feeling. It’s one that plenty of great games would build on and do more with, from Damocles (which was released in 1990 but had already been trailed before Starglider 2’s release and was mentioned as a comparison in at least one review) to The Outer Wilds in 2019. But playing Starglider 2 alongside its chart-topping 8-bit contemporaries helps bring home just how amazing the extent of what it did and how it looked must have been in 1988.

Julian Rignall, newly working for Computer & Video Games rather than Zzap!, wrote that “Starglider II is an incredible program that pushes computer gaming to new heights. I can quite honestly say that I’ve never been so enthralled and addicted by any other game — the urge to explore is incredible.” Matthew Evans at his old magazine matched his enthusiasm: “Forget Mercenary, forget Elite, this is the 3D computer game. If you decide that you don’t want this, then why have you got an Amiga?”

Bob Wade in ACE didn’t manage quite the same superlatives, but still wrote that “the action hangs together extremely well. Unlike the original, it isn’t a straightforward shoot-em-up, but a combination of exploration and blasting […] It’s been well thought out and is full of superb touches that raise it out of the ordinary.” Those touches include the way that if you fly too close to the star the cockpit interface melts and drips down the screen in an increasingly pixel-y mess. Well, your ship is called the Icarus.

This time, Argonaut managed to put out the Amiga and Atari ST versions simultaneously. They even took the innovative, but unreliable and soon abandoned, approach of including both on the same disk, so that shops would be stocking both versions by default. Later on Rainbird released a Spectrum port (by Steven Dunn, who later recalled that “it was tricky because of the storyline element”). A Commodore 64 version was started by Pete Baron but abandoned unfinished. As he told Games That Weren’t, “the whole thing was a bit of a disaster and the project only lasted for 6 months”, and he “couldn’t find any way of increasing the detail without making the game unbearably slow”.

On this occasion, though, a shortage of 8-bit versions was no problem. The Games Machine predicted that “Starglider II is surely destined not only to break software sales records but most likely increase hardware sales too as it perfectly displays the potential of 16-bit machines”. On first release, it went to #1 in Gallup’s combined formats despite only having sales from the Atari ST and Amiga, with the ST predictably the higher of the two. It had taken three years for the Atari ST and Amiga to get that far, but they were finally living up to their potential for popular games. And Argonaut were showing a whole lot of potential of their own, which would soon attract a quite different 16-bit opportunity.

---

---

---

Sources:

• Memories of Rainbird & Beyond Software, Richard C. Hewison, Fusion Retro Books, 2026
• Starglider (Rainbird), Richard C. Hewison, The Bird Sanctuary, 2019, accessed via Wayback Machine
• Britsoft: An Oral History, Alex Wiltshire, Read Only Memory, 2015
• Matthew “Manic Miner” Smith: complete transcript of 2005 interview, Pixelatron, 2010 
• Super Nintendo: How one Japanese company helped the world have fun, Keza MacDonald, Guardian Faber, 2026
• Now the Chips are Down: The BBC Micro, Alison Gazzard, MIT Press, 2016
• A Gremlin in the Works 1983-2015, Mark James Hardisty, Bitmap Books, 2016
• Desert Island Disks: Jez San, Paul Drury, Retro Gamer No. 137, 2015
• Nintendo makes a killing with its British flying ace, Margaret Park, The Daily Telegraph, 24 May 1993, accessed via Newspapers.com and the Wayback Machine
• Introducing the wizards, Richard Bartle, March 1985, reproduced on mud.co.uk
• Software Spotlight – Skyline Attack, P.R.B., Your Commodore No. 8, May 1985, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Go far with Starglider, Andrew Bennett, Atari ST User Vol. 1 No. 10, December 1986, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Ace buys – Starglider, ACE No. 1, October 1987, accessed via the Internet Archive
• Screen Scene – Starglider, Francis Jago, Commodore User No. 44, May 1987, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack
• Review – Starglider II, Steve Jarratt, The One No. 1, October 1988, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack
• Reviews – Starglider II, Julian Rignall, Computer & Video Games No. 83, September 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
• 16-bit – Starglider 2, Zzap! 64 No. 42, October 1988, accessed via Def Guide to… Zzap! 64
• Screen Test – Starglider 2, Bob Wade, ACE No. 13, October 1988, accessed via the Internet Archive
• In the quiet solace of space…, The Games Machine No. 11, October 1988, accessed via Amiga Magazine Rack
• Starglider 2, Frank Gasking, Games That Weren’t 64, 2012
• Carrier Command, Starglider, Starglider 2, chart histories at Computer Hits

---