Wilmunder's Star Raiders II Released

Star Radiers was as close to Star Wars as Atari got, the Parker Brothers game The Empire Strikes Back was Star Wars but it was a Snow Speeder attacking AT-AT walkers. I'm talking more about a Star Wars type space battle game.

The extra controller as a keypad made it so you could toggle on and off stuff on your ship. Without it you couldn't play the game.

A friend borrowed my 2600 collection and never gave it back, so I lost every cartridge and controller I had. I think he ended up selling it for money without telling me. The same thing happened to my Amiga collection with a different friend and my C64/C128 collection with yet another different friend. I was too nice in letting friends borrow my stuff. Even a Vic-20 I let another different friend borrow so he could get on BBS systems with a 300 baud modem and he never gave it back.

But losing Star Raiders hurt me most of all. I even think there was an Atari Force comic book for it. http://www.atariage.com/comics/

From Author Aric Wilmunder: "In 1983 I was hired by Atari Corporate Research and in '84 I transferred to Atari Coin-Op where I was part of a small R&D team under Lyle Rains, the brains behind Asteroids and Atari Football. I was tasked with designing and building a sequel to Star Raiders, the most sophisticated space battle simulator of it's time. While I was still working on the design, Atari Marketing had purchased the rights to develop games based on the movie The Last Starfighter, and when the movie did poorly at the box-office, they quickly re-branded the Atari 800 game as Star Raiders II. The actual sequel that I was coding was just a few months from completion and as a result it never shipped, but it did serve as my resume when I went to work for George Lucas' fledgling games group, Lucasfilm Games. So after more than 30 years sitting on a floppy disk in my garage, here's the true Star Raiders II."