Galactic Attack

About this game

Galactic Attack

Galactic Attack was a 1980 video game written for the Apple II by Siro-Tech, which would soon thereafter be renamed to Sir-Tech.

It was a single-player adaptation of the game Empire from the PLATO mainframe network to the much smaller non-networked environment of a standalone 8 bit microcomputer.

In Galactic Attack, the player's job was to liberate the solar system from the dreaded Kazanta invaders by destroying the Kzanta's ships and bombarding the Kzanta's forces on the planets of the solar system and then beaming down armies to secure the planets. The game's framing uses the same loose Star Trek framing as Empire; the universe is two dimensional, with the user's starship placed in the center of their tactical screen. Ships have phasers which fire in a cone, with damage proportionate to distance, a limited number of torpedoes that can be in flight at any given time and which proceed in a straight line until they hit a target or time out, deflector shields, a range of warp speeds, and a limited energy supply that slowly automatically regenerates. Weapons were fired on compass bearings by typing in degree headings.

Sir-Tech would follow up Galactic Attack with the far more commercially successful game Wizardry, which was an adaptation and evolution of PLATO system dungeon crawl games, in particular Oubliette and Moria.