Reactor

The game activity starts with the player's ship contained within the heart of a nuclear reactor. The player moves his ship using the track ball and has the use of a rapid fire energy button and a decoy button to protect himself.

During the game play, the core expands as the enemy particles attempt to destroy the player's ship by deflecting it against the kill wall. Simultaneously, the player must destroy the enemy particles by using his ship to deflect them against the kill wall.

Most people remember Reactor for its attract mode music, which is a series of guitar riffs synthesized using distortion. Hitting any button in attract mode will cause Reactor to blast its awesome music.

Pushing the energy button when the player's ship is in contact with an enemy particle will increase the force applied to both the player's ship and enemy particle. When the decoy button is pushed, a decoy will emerge from the player's ship. The decoy will remain stationary at the point where the ship was located when the button was pushed. The decoy confuses the enemy so that they attack the decoy instead of the player. The decoy cannot be destroyed and should be placed in one of three positions:

1. Next to a kill wall
2. In front of the control rods
3. Inside the entrance to the bonus chambers

In doing so, the enemy particles will be lured into a position that will allow the player to:

1. Destroy them against a kill wall.
2. Destroy the control rods.
3. Trap them in the bonus chamber.

Knocking down either set of control rod, with enemy particles will reduce the size of the core. Knocking down both sets of control rods will add an extra decoy.

Every 15,000 points, the player earns one extra ship this depends upon a DIP switch setting. While the enemy particles are in the bonus chambers, they will deflect off one another and the walls. As they are deflected off the walls, a bonus is scored. To achieve maximum bonus, the player must use the ENERGY button to hold the enemy particles in the bonus chamber as long as possible. The player earns 15 points per bounce during the early rounds and 15 points per bounce as the game progresses. On each round, point values per bounce increase.

As the game play progresses, the reactor core continually grows in size, which decreases the usable playfield. During the early rounds, the core is a rectangular shape which expands outward, forcing the player closer to the dangerous kill walls. The player can shrink the core by destroying eaither set of control rods or killing the total amount of enemies "TO GO" for each round.

In later rounds, the rectangular expanding core is replaced with an expanding and swirling vortex. Unlike the rectangular core, the vortex is deadly to the player. As it enlarges, it will draw the player to its center where the player will be destroyed. A skillful player can get out of the vortex even after being caught by moving the ship in a clockwise direction.

The ideal game play is a balance of using the decoys and bounce chambers to accumulate large bonus points, extra ships and using the control rods to gain extra decoys.

This game was created by Tim Skelly who also created many of the Cinematronics vector games including Sundance, Star Castle and Solar Quest.

The game is housed in an orange cabinet that is shorter than a typical upright cabinet. The side art is orange, red, and yellow and has the Gottlieb logo, some graphics of the Reactor core and the name of the game. The control panel is black with yellow and orange writing on it. The marquee is located at about eye level and has two large speakers that put the music and sound directly in the player's face. The monitor glass is plain glass with a small black border.

This game is the predecessor to other Gottlieb titles like Qbert, Mad Planets and Krull. These all run on a similar hardware platform.

The Gottlieb system boards are based upon the Intel 8088 microprocessor. The sound board is identical to other Gottlieb games like Qbert and uses the hard-to-find LM379S op-amp chip to mix and amplify the sound and speech. The speech is generated by the Votrax SC-01 speech chip.