How to play Sinistar online
- Fly your ship: arrow keys
- Drop a Sinibomb: Space bar (your lasers fire automatically)
- Start a game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Save and load your progress: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it
Gameplay
Your enemy is the Sinistar, a huge mechanical face that is slowly being built out in space. Only Sinibombs can hurt it, so shooting it with lasers does nothing. To make Sinibombs you need Sinisite crystals. Fly close to a planetoid and shoot it, and small crystals break loose. Grab them before they drift away.
Two kinds of enemy ship get in your way. Workers mine crystals of their own to finish building the Sinistar, and Warriors attack you directly. In the arcade game, Workers also stole your crystals, but in this version they don’t. Once the Sinistar is complete, it comes after you. Each Sinibomb knocks a piece off it, and 18 hits destroy it completely. If you only damage it, the Workers repair it. Destroy it and you move on to the next sector, which is harder.
The arcade machine had one button for the lasers and another for the bombs. The 2600 joystick has only one button, so here the lasers fire on their own and the button drops bombs. The arcade game’s famous synthesised voice is missing too, because the 2600 could not reproduce it.
Tips
- Hunt the Workers. The more Workers you destroy, the slower the Sinistar is built. With luck you can find it half-built and harmless.
- Don’t waste bombs. Your lasers can’t hurt the Sinistar, and you need a lot of Sinibombs to finish it off, so drop them only when it is close.
- Finish the job. A damaged Sinistar gets repaired, so keep mining crystals and go back before the Workers rebuild it.
Why Sinistar was never released
Four versions of the prototype are known, from January and February 1984. The earliest has no flicker handling, a version from 23 January still lacks the Warrior ships, and the one from 13 February is almost complete. Atari had already commissioned artwork for it, so the game seems to have been only weeks away from production. By early 1984 the home video game market was collapsing, and many finished or nearly finished games were cancelled. No record explains exactly why Sinistar was dropped. A version for the Atari 8-bit computers was also nearly finished and was never released either. The arcade game itself did not get an official home release until compilations in the 1990s.