Sinistar (Atari 5200)

Sinistar for Atari 5200

Sinistar was a fairly popular arcade game released by Williams Electronics in 1983. Interestingly, in a time when arcade to home ports were very common, no home port of Sinistar was released until more than a decade later as part of several of the Midway compilations for a variety of systems. Versions for the Atari 2600 and Atari 8-bit computer line were planned and mostly completed but for some reason never released. This probably had a lot to do with the video game crash and the decline in popularity of home video games at that time. 8-bit computer games were quite popular still but the Atari line was rapidly losing market share to the Commodore 64 and the Apple II.

Thanks to the magic of the internet, the nearly completed Atari 8-bit version has been found, ported to the Atari 5200 and released. For more information on this, to order a cartridge, or to download an image for emulators, see https://atariage.com/store/index.php?l=product_detail&p=955

The Atari 5200 was the second major console released by Atari. It was released in 1982 and discontinued after less than two years and a million units sold. In terms of hardware, it was nearly identical to their 8-bit computer line except that it used analog controllers. They were a little ahead of their time with this as most games of the time weren’t really suited to such controllers (plus they didn’t auto center). Despite the fact that the Atari 5200 was the most advanced system of the time, it did not fare well commercially. Part of this was due to the video game crash and part of it was do to some bad design decisions, particularly in regards to the controllers.