Starmaster

Starmaster is set in outerspace where the player must protect starbases from enemy starfighters.

The game can be played a four levels of difficulty, with the first being "Ensign" having nine enemy fighters to defeat with meteors and enemies moving at normal speed while the highest being "StarMaster" with 31 enemies to defeat and the speed of meteors and enemies moving at 2.5 times the speed as Ensign.

Starmaster was designed by Alan Miller for Activision. Miller had previously developed games at Atari, Inc. such as Surround (1977), Hangman (1978) and Basketball (1978). After leaving Atari, Inc. to form Activision with David Crane, Miller made the games Checkers (1980), Tennis (1981) and Ice Hockey (1981).

For his next game Starmaster, Miller described being influenced by Cosmic Conflict! (1978) for the Magnavox Odyssey². He believed he could improve on realism of that game's space flight by having the stars move towards the player. In a 2003 interview with Digital Press, Miller said he was also inspired by Doug Neubauer's game Star Raiders (1980) for the Atari 8-bit computers, saying he "sought to replicate that feeling of flying through space on the much more limited Atari 2600."

The Video Game Update stated that along with Chopper Command, Starmaster were the best new releases of the month and that Starmaster was the "a game to challenge the most sophisticated player, with enough features to make total mastery a long-term proposition."

Bill Kunkel and Arnie Katz of Electronic Games noted the familiarity of the game noting it belonged to the "Trek" genre of games which had dozens of titles, but was an achievement for its richness for an Atari 2600 game. The reviewers concluded that the game had staying power due to its wide range of play possibilities. Tim Onosko of The Capital Times saw the influence of the computer game Star Raiders had on Miller's game, but found it far more satisfying than the Atari 2600 version of the game, being visually superior to the Atari 2600 port and more challenging than other similar games such as Phaser Patrol (1982).