How to play River Raid online
- Steer left and right: left and right arrow keys
- Speed up / slow down: up and down arrow keys
- Fire missiles: Space bar
- Start a new game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Choose a game variation (one or two players): F11 (the console’s Select switch)
- Straight or guided missiles: F4 toggles the Player 1 difficulty switch
Gameplay
You pilot a jet up the “River of No Return”, behind enemy lines. The river never ends: it keeps scrolling as long as you survive. Your jet stays near the bottom of the screen and moves only left and right, but you can speed up or slow down. You lose a jet if you hit the riverbank, crash into an enemy or run out of fuel.
The fuel gauge at the bottom of the screen is the heart of the game. You refuel by flying over fuel depots, but you can also shoot them for points, and deciding which to do is the game’s key choice. Depots get rarer the further up the river you go. Each section ends with a bridge. Destroying it acts as a checkpoint: if you crash later, your next jet starts from the last bridge you destroyed.
| Target | Points |
|---|---|
| Tanker (ship) | 30 |
| Helicopter | 60 |
| Fuel depot | 80 |
| Jet | 100 |
| Bridge | 500 |
The difficulty switch changes your missiles. In position A they fly straight ahead. In position B they are guided and follow your jet’s side-to-side movement, which makes aiming easier.
Tips for a longer flight
- Refuel before you need to. Once the gauge drops below half, fly over every depot you can. Further up the river they appear less often.
- Don’t shoot depots when you’re low. 80 points is never worth losing a jet.
- Slow down in narrow sections. Braking gives you more time to react to banks and enemies.
- Always destroy the bridge. It is worth 500 points and it saves your position.
- Watch the helicopters and ships. Some start moving sideways as you approach. Shoot them early rather than trying to squeeze past.
The story behind River Raid
Carol Shaw had already made games at Atari before joining Activision, and she is often called one of the first female video game designers. Inspired by the 1981 arcade game Scramble, she wanted a game with a continuously scrolling screen. Activision co-founder Alan Miller told her there were already too many space games, so she moved the action to Earth.
Sketching on graph paper, Shaw found that horizontal scrolling looked jerky on the 2600, so she made the game scroll vertically. A mirrored playfield produced a river with islands in the middle. The player first controlled a boat, until David Crane suggested a jet would look better. The whole game fits in 4 kilobytes. It generates the river in real time rather than storing a map, which is why the river can go on forever.
River Raid was Activision’s best-selling game of 1983 and won year-end awards, including an Arkie Award. It was later ported to the Atari 8-bit computers, the Atari 5200, the Intellivision, the Commodore 64, the ZX Spectrum and other systems, and a sequel followed in 1988. In West Germany it was banned in the mid-1980s because of its military theme.
Similar games to play next
- River Raid II – the 1988 sequel
- Chopper Command – Activision’s helicopter shooter
- Seaquest – underwater rescues, with oxygen instead of fuel to manage
- Beamrider – a fast-paced space shooter from Activision
- Vanguard – a scrolling arcade shooter