Star Ship

Star Ship is from the view point of a star ship cockpit as it travels through space. The goal of the game is to destroy enemy space objects with a laser beam when they are within the target area to score points within a set amount of time. These space objects include a star fighter worth one point, and a space robot worth three points. If the player's ship collides with these space objects or the undestroyable asteroids scattered through space, they lose one point.

In single-player mode, the game lasts two minutes and sixteen seconds. The game's difficulty settings can be adjusted to allow for either one or two space objects to appear at a time and adjust whether they move at a slow or fast pace. In two-player mode, the game lasts four minutes and thirty-two seconds. In this game, the players take turns as the Star Ship Commander and the Module Commander.

Star Ship's lead designer was Bob Whitehead who joined Atari's programming department in January 1977. The game was his first game developed for the Atari Video Game System. While no project was officially assigned to him, he was encouraged by the company to adapt existing titles to the console. Prior to the release of Star Ship, Atari had developed an arcade game titled Starship 1 which released in August 1977. Whitehead was interested in the 3D perspective of the arcade game and found that outer space themed games were popular at the time, he attempted to adapt the in development arcade game to the console.

Whitehead said that both the "Lunar Lander" and "Warp Drive" games were variations on Starship 1 theme which worked well within the kernel he had developed for the main game as it allowed for some elements to be reused without requiring a lot of new code. Star Ship may have gone through a name change while in development as early press material and advertisements refer to it as Space Mission.

From contemporary reviews, David H. Ahl wrote in Creative Computing that the sound effects in Starship "added a great deal" to the game's overall quality. In his overview of the system, Ahl did not list it in his discussion of games he recommended for the system, which only included Video Olympics, Surround, Outlaw (1978), and Breakout while stating all the games for the system "are designed with many hours of fun in mind." An anonymous reviewer in Video magazine complimented that the game looked nice but that the game was "hard to get a handle on."

From retrospective reviews, In his book The Complete Guide to Electronic Games (1981), Howard J. Blumenthal wrote that while the gameplay was simple, it was a very hard game due to the inaccuracy of the target area. Brad Cook of AllGame found that Star Ship "isn't very good, even by late '70s standards" finding the two-player mode did not work due to the first-person perspective and that the sound effects were inappropriate for a space-themed game while the graphics were not bad with the exception of the bug-like space robots and the asteroids that resemble explosions. Kevin Bunch, in his book Atari Archive: Vol.1 1977-1978 (2023) described the game as a "middling entry" among the early Atari VCS titles finding that none of the game modes are bad, but that none of them particularly stood out. Both Blumenthal and Bunch wrote that the game paled in comparison to the similarly themed Star Raiders (1980) for the Atari 8-bit computers.

Whitehead later referred to the game as being "clunky" and that he said it was ambitious to attempt a 3D game on the system, but he was up for the challenge as "the more impossible it seemed, the more it seemed to motivate me. It was tricky [...] I'm not sure if I completely pulled it off to satisfaction, but I think it turned out pretty good for basically my first game."

Other developers for early programmable consoles built-on the first-person perspective and outer space-themed elements of both Star Ship and Star Raiders. These include Activision's Starmaster (1982), Starpath's Phaser Patrol (1982), and Imagic's Star Voyager (1982), with Bunch stating the latter skewed far closer to Star Ships's gameplay.