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You can read about the history of Datamost in the earlier article: Money Munchers.
In 1982, Peter Filiberti discovered Sega’s hot new isometric vertical arcade shooter Zaxxon. He became fascinated with the game, playing it at the neighboring arcade with his friends. He decided to write his own version. At the time, he had an Atari and Commodore repair shop. He decided to target the game for Atari systems. He spent the rest of the year writing the game in machine language. He made a deal with Datamost to publish the game, which was released in 1983.
The game’s manual is pretty sparse, but it does describe the story of the game:
Your Plane Is Flying Over Enemy Territory
Your job is to destroy all military muscle of the enemy and get across the battlefield to attack the base.
Your fuel is indicated by a red line across the bottom of the screen along with the score and the number of ships you have left. The red line gets shorter as fuel is consumed. When the line is gone so are you.
Bomb a fuel depot and your fuel is magically replenished, so don’t miss any of these.
The enemy will be shooting flack at you, so keep your eyes open, it’s hard to see and harder yet to dodge!
After destroying an enemy base you will receive a bonus of 1000 points multiplied by the level you are on. For example destroying an enemy base on level six is worth 6000 points. After destroying a base you are advanced to the next level where the battle is swifter and the enemy more powerful!! After you complete the commander level (level 5) you will receive an extra ship. Also notice that the harder the level, the faster the fuel is used up!! It’s tough out there so Good Luck and Have Fun!
The February 1983 issue of Computer Entertainer also had a description of the game in their announcement:
A new title planned for the 400/800 is NIGHTRAIDERS, a fast-action space game which takes place in the 21st century. You are the leader of an attack mission assigned to fly over enemy terrain at night, destroying tanks, missile cannons and plasma depots. Moving your joystick foward activates your ship's thrusters, and by leaving them on for more than 2 seconds you can go into Hyperdrive. When you're in Hyperdrive, the enemy's tracking system cannot lock onto your ship. Suggested retail $29.95 disk only.
Byte Magazine included Nightraiders in a roundup of games in their February 1984 issue:
Nightraiders, a space-war game. You have joined the Nightraiders corps to rescue Earth from tyranny. Destroy the enemy's military strength and cross the battlefield to attack the base. As you fly over enemy territory you encounter targets such as a tank, bridge, radar tower, missile, train cars, and more. For 800/1200; floppy disk, $29.95. Datamost Inc.
I found a review of the game by Vincent Puglia in the July 1984 issue of Electronic Games:
Nightraiders is a poor man's Zaxxon. As in the classic, the object is to get through the preliminary screens in order to destroy the enemy base. Anything and everything that moves is a target, and points are determined by the type of enemy destroyed and the level being played on. Also like Zaxxon, fuel is replenished by destroying fuel depots. Unfortunately, this is where the similarity between the two programs ends.
Although the graphics in Nightraiders are slightly above normal — especially those of the city and the tanks within it — they're not what gamers have come to expect in bombing run games. True, the screens scroll down from the top, but there is no sense of perspective. In the game, the player doesn't have to worry about clearing an obstacle such as a building or a wall. Instead, his only concern is blasting everything in sight.
Perhaps the worst aspect of Nightraiders is the documentation. The gamer has no idea what any of the targets look like before playing the game. In some cases, this is only a minor annoyance — trains, after all, are trains — but, this reviewer is still not certain what the enemy base and the fuel depots look like. Nor is the documentation clear about how many points (besides the bonus) are gained by destroying the base.
All in all, Nightraiders would make a good videogame, but leaves much to be desired as a computer game.
Are you interested yet? You can play the game on Archive.org.
Want to tinker with the original code? I found this comment from Peter Filiberti in the comments of an article on Nightraider:
As promised, the Source Code to Nightraiders is released and in the Public Domain. I hope some new iterations are made. https://github.com/styck/NightraidersAtari
Have you ever played Nightraiders? Do you know anything about its history? Tell us about it in the comments below.
