"Muddled and cliched hopes to balance the checkbook and organize recipes aside, the real reason people walked out of computer stores in 1980 with brand new Atari 800 computers was to play Doug Neubauer's masterpiece, "Star Raiders." It was a game ahead of its time, the first of the real-time, 3-D space combat genre. Packed into 8K of ROM, "Star Raiders" featured smoothly scaling sprites, particle explosions, a rotatable 3-D "sector scan" display, and a level of interactivity that is rarely attained by similar, modern games: you can destroy your own starbases; enemy ships move around while you are looking at a full-screen "Galactic Chart"; you can shoot an asteroid, accelerate quickly, switch to a rear view, and watch the debris recede into space. Before "Star Raiders," Doug worked at National Semiconductor. After being hired at Atari, he designed the POKEY chip for the Atari 800, which was responsible for I/O and audio. (The overall original plan for the 800 was created by Steve Mayer, Joe Decuir, and Jay Miner.) Later, while the Atari 2600 was slowly dying, he created some of its most technically amazing games, including "Solaris"--a follow-up to "Star Raiders" that, even on more primitive hardware, out-did the original on almost all counts." - Dadgum Games