Star Fire

The player flies through starfields, zapping enemy starfighters out of existence. The player controls whether the ship is moving forward or backwards via a lever, and a control yoke translates the player's view left, right, up, or down. The player has a button that fires quad-linked lasers at a targeting reticle. The lasers travel slowly, taking about two seconds to reach their target, and only one shot can be in the air at once.

Furthermore, each shot the player fires causes heat to build up in his ship. If the player's rate of fire is too high, the guns will overheat and need to cool down before they will fire again.

Ted Michon, an alumnus of California Technical Institute, was a technician for the arcade company Digital Games/Micronetics. There, he created an early microprocessor game called Night Racer before leaving the company in 1976 to found his own arcade company called Techni-Cal. He hired David Rolfe, an assembly programmer from the Institute who had no interest in video games, but was willing to solve coding problems.

Michon was inspired by the spaceship battles in the film Star Wars, and devised a game that aimed to recreate the sense of freedom of space flight. Michon's girlfriend (and later wife), Susan Ogg, was the game's artist. The assets drawn were heavily borrowed from Star Wars, from the logo and the TIE fighter-like enemy ships, the Death Star-like enemy base, and the X-wing-like laser cannons on the player's ship. The developers had hoped that they could secure a Star Wars license, which would have made their product the first official Star Wars video game.

Reviewing it at the 1978 Amusement & Music Operators Association Exposition, Play Meter praised the game's mostly enclosed cabinet design as providing a sense of actually piloting a ship in space. It compared the game to Atari's Starship 1, but contrasted the two as the former used a color monitor. It further lauded the game's visuals and sound effects, and noted its initials-based high score system and that in-game collisions with enemy fighters cause the entire cabinet to vibrate.

A 1983 article in Electronic Games called Star Fire a "closet classic ... deserving of a better fate", and "ahead of its time and unable to find a market". Robert J. Sodaro of Ahoy! enjoyed the Commodore 64 Star Fire more than Fire One, citing "the feeling of motion the onrushing starfield provides", but called both "solid programming offerings".

Star Fire is remembered as the first game to allow players to enter their initials next to their high scores. It is also one of the few games where the copyright holder has granted permission to freely run the game in MAME for non-commercial purposes.

An arcade cabinet of the video game "Star Fire" can be seen in the 1979 movie "The Man Who Stole the Sun", where the main character, portrayed by Kenji Sawada, appears playing it for a brief moment.