Suicide Mission

Name:	Suicide Mission
Company:	Starpath
Model #:	AR4012
Programmers:	Steve Hales and Stephen Landrum
Year:	1982
Released?	Yes
Notes:	Originally called Meteoroid

Ever seen the movie Fantastic Voyage?  No?  Ok, ever play the game Fantastic Voyage?  Still no?  Hmm... How about Body Wars at EPCOT center?  If not no worries, you've more than certainly seen this plot before somewhere before.  You are a scientist who has been shrunk down and put in a human patient.  Your mission to to wipe out the infection that is threatening the patient's heart.  Using your penicillin torpedoes you must destroy all the nasty viruses before they overrun your ship.

Does Suicide Mission look a little familiar?  Maybe if you replaced the little viruses with large rotating rocks?  Yes that's right, Suicide Mission originally started out as a 'vector style' Asteroids clone called Meteoroid.  Using the Venetian Blinds technique developed by Bob Whitehead, Starpath was all set to release what Atari players had always wanted, an arcade accurate (or nearly so) version of Asteroids.  Unfortunately Atari caught wind of this and threatened to sue Starpath if they released Meteoroid as is, so a few graphical tweaks later Suicide Mission was born.

Being an Asteroids 'inspired' game, Suicide Missions controls are not surprisingly similar to its arcade inspiration.  Pushing left or right will rotate your ship, up will engage your thrusters, and down will activate your shield (called a screens here).  Using your screens too long will cause it to overheat and blow your ship up, so you'll have to let it cool down between uses.  Suicide Mission has three different difficulty levels which affect some of the gameplay elements.  On easy everything is, well, easy.  On medium your screen will overheat faster, and on hard there's now a current that keeps your ship constantly moving around the screen.

It's a shame that Starpath wasn't able to release Meteoroid in its original form, because it was as close as gamers were ever going to get to a home version of vector Asteroids.  Still, Suicide Mission is pretty close to Meteoroid with a few minor graphical and gameplay changes.  It's sort of amazing that Atari let Suicide Mission be released at all since you can still see the strong Asteroids influence (the shape of the enemies is about all that was changed).  Perhaps Atari felt that they shouldn't press their luck with a second lawsuit or maybe they had bigger fish to fry?

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