Air Raid

How to play Air Raid online

• Move your ship left and right: left and right arrow keys
• Fire missiles upward: Space bar
• Start a new game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
• Choose one of the eight game variations: F11 (the console’s Select switch)
• Save and load your progress: Ctrl+0–9 saves a state, Alt+0–9 loads it

Gameplay

Two brown buildings stand at the bottom of the screen, one on each side, and your ship hovers above them. Waves of flying saucers come down from the top of the screen and drop bombs, either on the buildings or on you. You slide left and right and shoot upward to destroy them before their bombs land. There are four kinds of attacking ships, and the waves never stop coming.

You have three ships. The game ends when all three are destroyed, or when both buildings have been bombed so badly that they collapse, even if you still have ships left. So you are not only trying to survive: you also have to guard the city below you.

The eight variations change how things move. In some, the enemy ships drift from side to side as they descend. In others, your shots bend sideways when you move. Some variations are faster, and some combine these changes.

Tips

• Protect the buildings first. Losing both buildings ends the game no matter how many ships you have, so shoot the saucers that are lined up over a building before the others.
• Start with the first variation. Enemies that drift sideways and shots that bend are much harder to judge, so learn the basic pattern before trying the later games.

The story behind Air Raid

Very little is known about Men-A-Vision. Its name appears only on the box, not on the cartridge, and some collectors remember the company as “Men-O-Vision”. AtariAge describes Air Raid as a hacked version of Space Jockey, the U.S. Games shooter, and says it appears to have been made in Taiwan. It is a different game from Mattel’s Air Raiders. The ROM is also unusual technically: AtariMania notes that it draws 290 scanlines per frame, which is outside the NTSC standard. On a real television this usually works, but in an emulator the picture rolls, so this page runs the NTSC conversion that Peter Rittwage made in 2005, which plays the same game with a steady picture.

The game got very limited distribution, and AtariAge rates it 10 out of 10 on its rarity scale. For years collectors had never seen the box. In April 2010 an Austin, Texas owner found one in his basement, and his boxed copy sold on eBay for $31,600. In 2012 the first known copy with cartridge, box and instruction sheet sold for $33,433.30. In 2021 a Goodwill employee in Fort Worth, Texas, came across a working cartridge, which sold for $10,590.79.