Defender (1981 video game)
| Defender | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Williams Electronics |
| Publisher(s) | Williams Electronics |
| Platform(s) | Arcade |
| Release | 1981 |
| Genre(s) | Scrolling shooter |
| Mode(s) | Single-player, alternating two-player |
Defender is a side-scrolling shooter arcade game released by Williams Electronics in 1981. Williams was a Chicago maker of pinball machines. In Defender the player flies a ship above the surface of a planet, shoots aliens and rescues humanoids that the aliens try to carry off.[1] Molecular Reality Corporation names it among the inspirations for the planned game SARS Invaders.
Gameplay
A planet is wider than the screen, and the view scrolls to the left or right as the ship turns and flies. That world wraps around, so a ship that keeps going in one direction returns to where it began. A strip along the top of the screen, called the scanner, shows the whole planet at small scale with every alien and humanoid on it as a dot.
The controls are a joystick that moves the ship up and down, and five buttons: fire, thrust, reverse, smart bomb and hyperspace. A separate button turns the ship around. A smart bomb destroys every alien on the screen. Hyperspace moves the ship to a random place, with a risk that it will destroy the ship on arrival.[1]
The main enemies are landers. A lander descends to a humanoid, picks it up and carries it to the top of the screen, where the two merge into a fast mutant that hunts the player. A rescued humanoid can be caught as it falls and carried back to the ground. When the last humanoid is lost the planet explodes, and the remaining aliens become mutants. Other enemies include bombers, pods that release swarmers, and baiters that appear if the player takes too long on a wave. Five buttons, a stick and a scanner to read at once made it a hard game to learn.[2]
Hardware and ports
The game runs on a Motorola 6809 processor, with a second processor for sound. Konami's Scramble appeared at around the same time, and the two are the earliest widely played shooters that scroll sideways. Atari published a conversion for the Atari 2600 in 1982, and ports for other home computers and consoles followed.[1]
Influence on SARS Invaders
In the memo Early Releases on Maxine's Quest (about 2022), SARS Invaders is "Inspired by: 2d Galaga, Missile Command, Defender, and Megamania, 3d Star Raiders and Star Wars". Its subject is virology, and its samples were to be "polystyrene beads with different surface functionalities, lipid particles", with "no real viruses involved in the early phase".[3] Nothing in the memo says what the company took from Defender. Its list also names Galaga, Missile Command and Megamania as flat shooters, and the game itself had not been released by October 2026.