Demon Attack

Demon Attack is set on a surface of a planet, when strange winged creatures float above, threatening the player. They attack, leading the player to retaliate by shooting at them with a laser cannon.

Matthew House of AllGame described the game as a fixed shooter. The players start with three lives, called bunkers in the game, which are displayed at the bottom of the screen. Each time the players are hit by enemy fire, they lose a bunker, and the game ends when all bunkers are depleted. The waves of enemies grow more complex as the game progresses, with wave five having enemies divide into two smaller enemies after being shot. Later waves have enemies that will dive towards the laser cannon.

Prior to working on Demon Attack, Rob Fulop worked at Atari developing sound effects for pinball machines as a summer job while studying electrical engineering at the University of California. Fulop's later projects included adaptations of arcade games such as Night Driver and Missile Command for the Atari 2600 and Space Invaders for the Atari 8-bit computers. He said that he expected a strong Christmas bonus from Atari based on how well Space Invaders had done commercially, but he only received a voucher for a free turkey dinner. Fulop then left Atari, and upon seeing how well Activision had been doing, he co-founded the company Imagic on July 17, 1981.

Fulop said that "I was angry at Atari and wanted to make something so good, they'd cry when they saw it. A lot of the best work is motivated by a desire to show someone what they've missed out on". This led to him designing Demon Attack. He said the game was modeled after Galaxian.

In the British magazine Computer and Video Games, a reviewer wrote that Demon Attack's enormous success was due to the tough gameplay and exceptional graphics. Reviews in other publications praised the graphics, with Jan Yarnot of The Space Gamer and Randi Hacker in Electronic Fun with Computers & Games describing the enemies as being "excellent" and "vibrantly colorful" respectively. Bill Kunkel and Arnie Katz wrote in Video and went as far to say that Demon Attack had the best graphics among the most recent Atari 2600 games. Commenting on the gameplay, Yarnot said that the different enemy patterns made the game appropriately challenging.

A reviewer in JoyStik How to Win at Video Games also commented that enemy movement was unpredictable, concluding the game was "simply one of the best game cartridges of its type available today". Yarnot commented negatively that the difficulty did not increase after the 12th wave, with earlier enemy patterns being repeated.

Upon the game's success, Fulop responded that he knew the game would do well, but did not think it would do as well as it did. Fulop felt that Cosmic Ark (1982), his next game at Imagic, was not going to be as strong, saying he "wasn't hungry in the same way—wasn't into 'making them cry'". Fulop said that Imagic wanted to make a sequel to Demon Attack, but "I was too stupid to realize the sequel makes a lot more money". He made other games for the Atari 2600 and later went on to develop games like Night Trap (1992) and create the popular Petz (1995–2014) series.

Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort in their book Racing the Beam (2009) said Demon Attack "broke the mold" of development in console games by having a dedicated artist for game development with Michael Becker's contributions to the game, noting that prior to this, an artist working in game development would only work on the box art or design a printed manual.