River Raid

In River Raid, the player is in a B1 StratoWing Assault Jet that is retrofitted with rapid-fire guided missiles and has the ability to both accelerate and slow down easily. The jet is going down the "River of No Return" where it is on a mission to break the enemy blockades and halt troop advances. Similar to endless runner games, the river has no ending and scrolls infinitely.

River Raid is played with the joystick. The player can move left and right on the screen and forward and backwards to accelerate and slow down respectively. The player can shoot missiles with the joystick's button to destroy enemy tankers, helicopters, fuel depots and bridges. The goal in River Raid is to collect as many points as possible before crashing or running out of fuel.

River Raid was designed by Carol Shaw for Activision. She said the idea of the game was mostly her own, with some feedback from other designers. Shaw recalled that there were numerous video games with scrolling and thought it would be wise to develop the game for the Atari 2600. She was initially inspired by the game Scramble (1981) and approached Alan Miller of Activision to develop a space-themed game. Miller responded that there were too many outer space–themed games, suggesting her to come up with a different theme.

Shaw created a game where objects scroll down the screen. She began drawing the game on graph paper and found that creating a game which scrolled horizontally would not work well and would appear "very jerky", leading it to be designed to scroll vertically. While doodling on graph paper, she found that she could design the game with a mirror image looking like a river with islands in the middle of it. Initially, the players would be controlling a boat which Shaw felt did not look good. She recalled Activision programmer David Crane's suggestion that a jet would look better, and she began designing one which appeared to be flying up a canyon.

River Raid was the top-selling Activision game of 1983 and the second best-selling game for the Atari 2600 in 1983, only being beaten by Ms. Pac-Man. Shaw responded to the sales stating "I knew it was a good game, but I didn't expect to hit number one. Of course I was happy when it did!" The Atari version had sold nearly one million copies by January 1984.

Early reviews from video game publications mostly found the game fun with varying takes on the quality of graphics and how it compared to similar games for home consoles. C. Meade of Videogaming Illustrated lauded the game for its exciting themes, fast-paced gameplay and high quality graphics, finding it superior to the ColecoVision game Zaxxon. Jim Clarke of the same publication declared it a "top-notch" game, but found it "surprisingly flat" after playing B-17 Bomber (1982) on Intellivision.

Shaw left Activision and the video game industry after programming the game Happy Trails (1983) for the Intellivision and releasing ports of River Raid for the Atari 5200 and 800 computer system. In 2017, Shaw won The Game Awards Industry Icon Award for her contributions to the video game industry.

River Raid popularized vertically scrolling shooters among the home console audiences. The Atari 2600 was experiencing what video game historian Brett Weiss described as "a resurgence of sorts" after Nintendo had success in the marketplace with the Nintendo Entertainment System. Atari had just re-released the system as a smaller budget-priced revision in 1986. Atari had convinced Activision to develop more games for the Atari 2600, starting with a port of the game Ghostbusters (1984).