BLAST OFF!
As pilot of the Space Fighter Draconian, your mission is to destroy enemy space stations – sector by sector – until they’re all wiped out!
ALERT! ALERT!
Your task won’t be easy - the enemy stations will relentlessly attack you with aggressive missiles and a barrage of defensive fire.
BATTLE STATIONS!
Formations of missiles will gang up and hunt you down. But if you take out the lead missile, the others will scatter!
SPY SHIP SIGHTED!
If you see one of the enemy’s Spy Ships you need to destroy it immediately! If it escapes, it will report your position, and then...
CONDITION RED!!
The enemy will throw everything it has at you. Can you survive long enough to move onto the next sector? Good luck! The galaxy is counting on you!
Draconian has all of the excitement you’d find in a classic arcade game! Featuring digitized voices, a radar scanner, enemy formation display, over 48 unique sectors, and much, much more! Draconian was written by Darrell Spice, Jr., whose previous Atari 2600 titles include Medieval Mayhem, Stay Frosty, Stay Frosty 2, and Space Rocks.
Gameplay
Enemy forces have had the audacity to invade our galaxy and set up occupation forces, operating from space stations that have been strategically placed throughout the five quadrants of our galaxy. (We’re aware that there should only be four quadrants, but interplanetary gerrymandering resulted in there being a fifth one.) Your mission is to choose one of the quadrants, then clear out the enemy forces, one sector at a time.
Game Options
- Features five Quadrants with sixteen sectors each!
- Built-in speech from the arcade without the need of an AtariVox!
- Quadrant Selection (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon)
- Includes user-designed sectors in the Delta quadrant!
- Starting Sector Selection
- Difficulty Level (Kids, Easy, Normal, or Hard)
- TV-TYPE Options (NTSC, PAL, SECAM Support)
- Built-in Pause feature
Draconian Poster
Nathan Strum's beautiful artwork for Draconian is featured on a 10" x 14" poster and including free with the game!
Additional InformationDraconian is a Melody-enhanced game that takes full advantage of the CDF mode in the Melody. Draconian includes game cartridge, beautifully illustrated 8-page manual, and a 10" x 14" poster featuring the Draconian box artwork! Draconian auto-detects NTSC, PAL60, and SECAM60 television formats. If auto-detection does not work on your system, you can manually override the TV setting.
Get a Draconian Box!
If you'd like a boxed copy of Draconian, please select "Box Upgrade: Yes" at the top of the page before adding Draconian to your cart. Our boxes are professionally printed and include a box insert to hold your Draconian cartridge in place. We want you to play our games, so we have not sealed or shrinkwrapped the boxes in any way, allowing you easy access to the game cartridge and manual.
These boxes are the same size as boxes Atari produced for their games "back in the day". They look great sitting on a shelf with your other boxed homebrew games, or alongside games from the classic Atari 2600 library. We only have a limited number of boxes for each game, and there is no guarantee they will become available again once our supplies are exhausted. Click on the images to the right to see larger photos of the box.
| Number of Players | 1 |
| Controller | Joystick |
| Cartridge Size | 32K CDF |
| Code and Design | Darrell Spice, Jr. |
| Additional Programming | Chris Walton |
| Graphics and Level Design | Nathan Strum |
| Music, Speech, Sound Effects | Michael Haas |
| Label, Box, and Manual Design | Nathan Strum |
The gameplay is incredible, with smooth, responsive controls, 8-way scrolling/shooting, and un-stuttering speed while the VCS draws an ungodly number of sprites and parallax scrolling starfield and foreground sprites on screen simultaneously. Flicker control is exceptional even under heavy load.
The polish of the game is professional. It has a menu that not only allows you to set up the game's difficulty, select starting stage, or continue, it also allows you to manually change TV type if the cart fails to detect it correctly. The sprites are colorful and highly detailed, and the voice system sounds right in place with an arcade game of the early 1980s. The explosions are bright, boomy and satisfying.
Draconian has set a new bar in terms of arcade shooters for Atari VCS, is spectacularly executed, and ridiculously fun to play. I strongly recommend this one and give it 5/5 stars.
The number of things displayed on the screen is amazing, the sound samples blew me away and gameplay is really, really good.
5-star without a single doubt.
This game is in a league of its own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOEic1uAFdI
Draconian for the VCS has a beautiful animated starfield background, plenty of things to blow up such as space stations, space turds and enemies - that all occupy the screen at once (nearly flicker-free I might add!) and help make this one of the more frantic shooters ever for the VCS. I especially like how your fighter is outfitted with laser canons fore AND aft. Allows for simultaneous shooting, which during those tense moments you're being chased and trying to out-maneuver, really comes in handy.
Level progression and design seem well balanced and 'just right' to me too. Attention to detail is obvious throughout. Everything is beautifully drawn, speech is rendered nicely and the tiny radar screen is effective as well.
Draconian has a particularly addictive arcade quality to it and with its high-score retention and option to continue while your machine is left on, keeps you coming back for more and more. You can believe all the hype, reviews and gameplay vids because Draconian *is* that great of a game!
An all-around A effort!
The gameplay is absolutely amazing. The controls are solid. The enemies look great. It is as impressive as the pictures you see online.
AtariAge continues to raise the bar with each homebrew. needless to say, this game gets 5 stars.
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