Starstrike squeezed 8-bit CPUs hard enough to bring a Star Wars-style 3D shoot-em-up to home computers in the mid-1980s. But it was Starstrike II, featuring solid polygons, original spaceship designs and a more detailed campaign, that blew me away. It was the first game my parents bought me on the Amstrad CPC I'd gotten for my birthday (via issue #12 of Amstrad Action) and I must have blasted at it for hundreds of hours. Along with other classics such as Carrier Command and 3D Tank Wars, it was co-created by Graeme Baird, who reportly died recently. The Retro Hour Podcast:
Sad to hear of the passing of Graeme Baird, an important early game developer whose work helped shape 3D gaming on home computers. He was best known for 3D Tank Duel, 3D Starstrike, and Realtime's work on Starglider. He was a co-founder of Realtime Games Software Ltd, where he played a key role in pushing the limits of early hardware. He later went on to work with Psygnosis and contributed to other games and projects over the years. His work remains an important part of the history of British game development.
Alongside Ian Oliver and Andrew Onions, Baird co-founded Realtime Games Software Ltd. in 1984 (all three men were former Leeds University students), and the company's early games – 3D Tank Duel (1984), 3D Starstrike (1984), Starstrike II (1986) and Starfox (1987) – gave players immersive 3D worlds on the relatively humble home computers available at the time.
Baird would make significant contributions to the likes of Starglider (he programmed the Spectrum and Amstrad versions alongside Ian Oliver) and Carrier Command, one of Realtime Games' most groundbreaking releases.
Here's footage of Starstrike II. Slow as it may be, everything you see and hear is powered by a single Zilog Z80, in an era before floating-point hardware, let alone GPUs. And here on the ZX Spectrum.
