Starship 1

Very simple gameplay. Pilot the Starship 1 thru space shooting the alien ships for points and avoiding collisions with planets which slow your pace. There are 4 different ships that appear at random worth from 50 to 500 points. The 500 point ship does not appear very often so you want to save as many photon torpedos as possible for him. He also flys very fast, as to be expected. The higher the point value the better manuvering, harder to hit, they are. You can shift from slow speed to fast speed with stars flying by you with the speed lever on the right. 5 photon torpedos are given at the start of each game. Using a torpedo will destroy all enemys on the screen at once! Earning 3500 points gets you extended play in 'hyperspace', about another 30 seconds of game time, then the game will end regardless of your score. It is a timed game.

This is not really a cheat, but the best stratagy is when you see one of the 500 point ships that rarely appear, to use your photon torpedos to hit them every time. You don't want to miss them!

For it's time, this is a very cool game, in the Star Wars type of game play, but black and white. The front monitor surround appears to have been mostly white plastic, however at least 1 reported factory painted blue one. Mike Jang, the designer of Atari video game cabinets during that time, says he does not remember seeing any other than white. He suggests it could have possibly been built at the Ireland plant. I own one of these blue surround models, so I know they exist. At the end of a game 2 various saying will be displayed. One simply saying to deposit a quarter to be the captain of Starship 1, the other say that 'Sensors detect another quarter in your pocket, deposit it to be the captain of Starship 1'. Pretty funny the first time you see it!

A huge cabinet. Very nice space oriented side art graphics showing a ship in the Starship 1 design flying around leaving multicolored trails behind while it's shooting at an enemy spacecraft. The victim ship shown is blowing up into pieces. The front of the game has a bezel that contains the game's marquee and the left and right speakers at about ear level.

Just inside of the outer plexiglass there is a cardboard bezel that goes down the left and right sides and along the bottom. It is a 3-D rendering of what appears to be a space station with men in space suits walking around it. The spaceman on the left is a seperate piece that is waving into the game in front of the station graphic. It is lit up by the light from the marquee passing thru a dark blue plastic mylar piece. There are background graphics that are illuminated by a black light bulb inside so the image appears to be flying thru space with the stationary background stars and galaxies. A very Cool looking game!

The Blue Bezel version was from a later run.