War of the Worlds1982

Fly your squadron of five ships around shooting down the enemy pilots. When you get hit, you simply lose one of your ships. After each round, you'll get a replacement ship which you have to maneuver into your formation or it's lost forever. In Tac-Scan, you control which direction you fly, though your planes stay in the same location of the screen.

Asteroids is an arcade space shooter released in November 1979. The player controls a spaceship in an asteroid field which is periodically traversed by flying saucers. The objective of the game is to destroy both, asteroids and saucers. The triangular ship can rotate left and right, fire shots straight forward, and thrust forward. Once the ship begins moving in a direction, it will continue in that direction for a time without player intervention unless the player applies thrust in a different direction. The ship eventually comes to a stop when not thrusting. The player can also send the ship into hyperspace, causing it to disappear and reappear in a random location on the screen, at the risk of self-destructing or appearing on top of an asteroid.

Tempest is a 1981 arcade game by Atari Inc., designed and programmed by Dave Theurer. It takes place on a three-dimensional surface, sometimes wrapped into a tube, which is viewed from one end and is divided into a dozen or more segments or lanes. The player controls a claw-shaped spaceship (named Blaster) that crawls along the near edge of the playfield, moving from segment to segment. Tempest was one of the first games to use Atari's Color-QuadraScan vector display technology. It was also the first game to allow the player to choose their starting level (a system Atari dubbed "SkillStep"). This feature increases the maximum starting level depending on the player's performance in the previous game, essentially allowing the player to continue. An official port was released for the Atari ST. An official port that bears the Atari logo was released by Superior Software for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron in 1985, and another by Electric Dreams for the ZX Spectrum and Amstrad CPC in 1987. Versions for the Atari 2600 and 5200 were in the works in Atari, Inc. during 1984, and unfinished prototypes exist for both of them.

Gravitar is a color vector graphics arcade game released by Atari, Inc. in 1982. The player controls a small blue spacecraft in a fictional solar system with several planets to explore. If the player moves his ship into a planet, he will be taken to a side-view landscape. Unlike many other shooting games, gravity plays a fair part in Gravitar: the ship will be pulled slowly to the deadly star in the overworld, and downward in the side-view levels. In the side-view levels, the player has to destroy red bunkers that shoot constantly, and can also use the tractor beam to pick up blue fuel tanks. Once all of the bunkers are destroyed, the planet will blow up, and the player will earn a bonus. Once all planets are destroyed, the player will move onto another solar system.

Set in the year 2003, the game involves using a spaceship to destroy enemy droid ships. The player's ship is controlled with a spinner to rotate the ship, a button for thrusting, and a button for firing lasers. The enemies that the player must destroy or avoid are drone ships, commander ships, two types of space mines, and shooting star ships. The ship bounces off an invisible barrier on the edges of the screen that briefly appears when hit. By default, Extra ships are awarded at 40,000 and 100,000 points, but this can be changed by the machine's owner.

Geometry Wars: Galaxies is set in a space-like environment where the player must shoot geometrical shapes in order to score points, gain lives, acquire bombs and survive as long as possible. The game is played to an upbeat electro soundtrack.

This 1981 vector graphics arcade game is available in both two- and four-player configurations. A top-down space shooter set within a bounded playfield, where the player maneuvers a ship using rotation, thrust and forward-firing controls (much like Asteroids or Space War). Each stage is populated by autmated drone ships (or by competing players), and dominated by the titular enemy: a moving, rotating space fortress surrounded by a lethal force field.

A Tempest inspired shoot'em up written by David Arthur Van Brink and published by Datamost for the Apple II.