The Atari 5200 has always been a black sheep of the classic gaming universe. Its many detractors will talk about the massive footprint of the system – one so large the original Xbox or Neo Geo look positively compact – the poorly designed controllers prone to breaking down even when not in use, and the fact that much of its library consists of basic ports of Atari 800 games (the system itself being little more than an Atari 400 with a funky controller). Enthusiasts will rightly point out, however, how the 5200 pioneered many of the gameplay elements we take for granted now. It has an analog controller with enough buttons (even a pause button!) to run fairly complex games, a slew of fantastic arcade ports, and some amazing home titles that hold up even today.

Possibly one of the best and most unnerving of these is Rescue on Fractalus. One of the very first releases by Lucasfilm Games (eventually renaming itself to LucasArts), it was set to come out for the 5200 in 1984, but didn’t limp out the door until 1986, alongside Gremlins and Ballblazer after Atari was bought out by the Tramiel family. In it, you are the pilot of a modified Valkyrie fighter, flying rescue missions on the inhospitable planet Fractalus. Humanity is at war with a species known as the Jaggis, and they have dug in on this world. While the bulk of the action is in space, you never see it; your duty is to pick up the pieces and rescue downed pilots. In a nutshell, you are supposed to maneuver your ship around the planet, dodge enemy gun emplacements, find downed ships, and pick up the pilots. There is a twist however, and it is terrifying the first time it happens.

For the first several levels, the game is fairly straightforward: you fly through the mathematically-generated landscape of mountains and valleys, pick off gun emplacements and kamikaze saucers before they can damage your shields, and look for a downed ship on your radar. Once you find one, it’s a matter of landing nearby, turning off your shields, waiting for the pilot to run over, and opening the airlock. Your task completed, you take off to find another pilot until you’ve reached a minimum amount and can blast off back to your mothership to head to the next stage. Had this been the entire game, it would get boring incredibly fast, but George Lucas himself suggested a way to give you, the player, a heart attack. To explain how, I’m going to back up and tell the tale of my first Fractalus experience.

The first time I sat down and really played this game was in 2011. I had picked it up during a trip to Chicago, and had finally hooked up the Atari 5200 to try out it and the other games I had picked up on the trip. I was impressed with the game – it had an effective first person perspective, made effective use of the many buttons on the 5200 to control thrust, land, boost into space, and handle the airlock. After several levels, though, I got complacent and settled into a routine: land, shut off shields, open airlock, wait for pilot to hop on board, and repeat. I had been doing this for a while, and had already reached my quote for the stage when I decided to go pick up another couple pilots. I found one, and went about my routine, barely even paying attention at this point. Imagine my shock when the siren started going off.

My ship began to shake as alert sounds screeched out of my TV. A message appeared at the top of the screen, screaming at me that a Jaggi had gotten about the ship and was tearing it apart. My ship has no internal weaponry, and clearly the other pilots were in no position to fight this thing off. Panicked, I took the only course of action I thought I had left: I fired the boosters to bring this fighter back to the mothership. It’s a terrible idea, if movies like Alien are any indication, but in the heat of the moment is was the only one that came to mind to save my life. Thankfully, it worked: the game never stated what happened, if the alien had been spaced or killed in the ship, but I survived to fly again. I was shaken up, however, and didn’t play for much longer before my nerves gave out and I quit flying.

It was strangely one of the most immersive moments I’ve ever had in a video game. I was that cocky pilot, who thought they had things well in hand, and I invited emergency onto myself. I panicked, and to save my own life I risked the entire ship, before losing my nerve entirely and dropping out of rescue missions entirely. The hellish world of Fractalus had won, and those men and women trapped on the rock would slowly perish without my runs to the surface.

As it turns out – and as a savvy reader of the manual can discover – some of the pilots have already been killed, and the Jaggi have donned their suits to try and sneak about the rescue ships. If you don’t open the airlock, they will leap onto the cockpit glass and punch their way in, venting the atmosphere and killing you instantly. The only way to stop them at that point is to activate your shields, which will vaporize them instantly.

Even without these tricky creatures, however, the planet itself is working against you. Starting on level 16, you are subjected to the day/night cycle of Fractalus, which lasts a whopping nine minutes both ways. Putting aside the sheer winds that would cause, as night falls, visibility drops precipitously until nothing but blackness is outside the cockpit. You can either fly using only your instrumentation, or you can land, shut down your systems, and try to wait out the darkness. When the only light source are the beams fired by the gun emplacements at your ship, there’s always a constant fear that you’ll end up flying into a mountain, draining your shields and crashing your fighter.

While the game does not introduce much more in way of new elements, it does build to an incredible level of difficulty. Gun emplacements are a more frequent sight, and tend to group together to hammer your fighter before you can get away, if you are unable to pick them off quick enough. More aliens hide out as pilots on the ground, and since the only way you can get more energy for your ship is by picking up actual pilots, this can drain your fuel reserves and kill you just as well as an alien on board can. Like nearly all classic video games, Fractalus will kill you, and the only way to look at it is whether or not you went out saving lives or cowering on a mothership, being overwhelmed for lack of space pilots.

The game found itself on numerous platforms outside of the 5200: the Atari 800 computer, the Commodore 64, the CoCo, the ZX Spectrum, the Apple II, and a few years ago, even a prototype Atari 7800 version had been discovered. Whatever system the game is played on, though, it remains a powerful and early example of how a basic action game can convey a simple story and play upon one’s own emotions and instincts.

Written by Ubersaurus