This Week In Retro: Sinistar (Patreon)

February 1983: RUN, COWARD!

by Diamond Feit

Everyone loves a good villain. That sounds like an oxymoron, but I’m not talking about antagonists who try to help people in their own way. When I say “good villain” I mean an exceptional heel, a right bastard, a malevolent force that we the audience want to see defeated—or in the case of video games, we want to defeat ourselves.

Looking at the earliest history of video games, as soon as the medium progressed past generic experiences based on sports or driving in circles, the bad guys took center stage more than the heroes. No one cared about the puny little ship in Space Invaders or Asteroids or Centipede; those games literally took their titles from the threats the player fought against. Even Nintendo felt the barrel-throwing ape had more marketable appeal than the overalls-wearing schlub trying to reclaim his girlfriend, hence the title Donkey Kong and not Jumpman.

40 years ago this month, one of the all-time greatest arcade villains made his debut. Decades away from the spotlight have significantly decreased his commercial appeal and legacy as a monster, but for those of us who were there, we remember him well. Yet even a first-time player of Sinistar in our modern age can tell why the game left such an impression on kids in 1983: The eponymous Sinistar will scare anybody.

Sinistar came to us from the people at Williams Electronics, already an arcade powerhouse in the early 80s thanks to hits like Defender, Joust, and Robotron 2084. Sinistar bears little resemblance to other contemporary shooters, as the player’s vessel has free reign to fly in all directions thanks to a much ballyhooed "49-way joystick," all while enemy spacecraft and chunks of rock speed across the screen. No harsh terrain or solid barriers block the player's flight in Sinistar, however, as the screen scrolls endlessly regardless of heading, looping the player back from whence they came.

Another twist Sinistar springs on the genre is the lack of contact damage from alien ships or even the asteroids bouncing around the playfield. Smacking your spacecraft against objects isn’t just safe, it’s a key technique as the player must mine raw materials for Sinibombs, a powerful subweapon that supplements the primary cannon. The enemy vessels also seek to harvest these geologic deposits, so a good portion of their fleet consists of unarmed Workers whose only concern is the asteroid field. Players can shoot the Workers or simply ram them to claim enemy crystals as their own.

I don't know what those asteroids are made of but it must be pretty potent space stuff, for just as the player needs crystals to stock up on Sinibombs, the enemy fleet needs crystals to assemble Sinistar, their most powerful weapon. Likely inspired by the Death Star, the spherical Sinistar is no mere space station, but an autonomous, sentient AI that relentlessly chases down his target and crushes it in his jaws.

"His"? "Jaws"? Yes, as a means of making their weapon even more frightening, the enemy scientists designed Sinistar with a humanoid face. Looking like a Quintesson (but predating those Transformer antagonists by several years), Sinistar's bright red eyes and permanently furrowed brow communicate his intent instantly to the player: Do not approach Sinistar under pain of death.

The pièce de résistance of Sinistar is that the eponymous monster talks with a distinctly human voice. Digitized speech had given earlier arcade machines limited capacity to draw in passerby with a few garbled words—Berzerk used this technology to great effect back in 1980—but Sinistar shouts so loudly and so clearly that even other players on nearby machines can hear him.

While his vocabulary lacks depth, Sinistar makes up for this with his confidence and candor. Aside from demonstrating self-awareness with lines like "I AM SINISTAR" and "I LIVE," he belittles and threatens the player by calling them a "COWARD" and implores them to "RUN, RUN, RUN!" He even expresses a sliver of humanity with just two words, "I HUNGER," implying that he doesn't just kill for pleasure or duty but to sustain his own existence. That, or maybe Sinistar just loves his job.

Thus, the gameplay loop of Sinistar challenges players to survive in space long enough to arm themselves with a sufficient number of Sinibombs to fend off Sinistar once he is fully constructed. Your standard cannon cannot hurt him and he travels much faster than your vessel, so from the moment he arrives, outer space is no longer big enough for the two of you; one of you must die.

A mini-map at the top of the screen offers a complete overview of the action, giving players a real-time awareness of enemy patterns and the means to interrupt Sinistar's assembly with a preemptive strike. However, attacking Sinistar before he comes to life will only stall his awakening as Workers will continue to perform their tasks. Only by bombing him into bits post-activation can a player advance to the next world.

To fully appreciate most golden age arcade games, I think you had to be there when the technology, circumstances, and culture of those crowded spaces was a new experience. However, Sinistar's use of voice samples and raw fear give it a timeless quality. I happened upon a cabinet a couple years ago and no matter how many high-resolution horror games I've played since I last saw Sinistar, nothing could assuage me from feeling genuine terror when he roared the second he saw me in range.

Even if you don't have access to a dedicated arcade, I encourage you to try Sinistar for yourself. Emulation of games from this era has advanced to the point that downloading special software or scouring the web for copyrighted material is no longer required; a modern web browser is robust enough to store all the data needed to play Sinistar right now on your computer. Just boot it up and start shooting; you'll likely survive the initial wave of pawns, hear Sinistar's voice cry out, and then shudder as he gleefully tracks you down and gnashes your ship to pieces. That sense of powerlessness and panic will sting just as much in 2023 as it did in 1983.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts about video games, films, and dessert.