Gravitar/Walkthrough

Once you have inserted your coin into the cabinet of Atari's 1982 multi-directional shooter arcade game Gravitar and pressed the Start Button, the game shall start in the first solar system with the player's ship at its home base in the centre of the screen; there are four regular planets (which are each worth 2000, 4000, 6000, and 8000 points when conquered), a fifth larger red planet (which is worth 9000 points when conquered), and a death star (which has no connection with the two Star Wars films). The last one is the centre of all gravitational pull (but must be avoided as it will kill your ship if it flies into it) - so you must direct your ship towards one of the four regular planets (or the larger red planet) instead (the numbers beside them, not shown in the image above, are the maximum amounts of bonus points for conquering them). Once your ship has flown into a planet, the screen shall zoom in on its surface; the planets have between two and eight red alien bunkers on its surface (which attack by firing shots at your ship when it is in their range, and are worth 250 points when destroyed). Destroying all the alien bunkers on the current planet shall cause the text MISSION COMPLETE to appear at the top of the screen (and you shall also receive the remaining bonus in the top-right corner of the screen when you return to the solar system) - and if your ship is too high above the surface of certain planets alien rammers (which are worth 100 points when destroyed) shall fly towards it. Each planet also has between two to four blue fuel cells, which are worth 2500 fuel units when beamed up with your tractor beam, positioned underneath its surface, but these are not essential to the conquering of them; the text SUPERBONUS shall also appear in the centre of the screen after conquering any regular planet in the first solar system with a point value below it based on the conquered planet's difficulty, except for if you conquered the 2000-point planet first or conquer the planets in increasing order of difficulty. Click on one of the images in the gallery below to see a full view of one of the first solar system's regular planets.

The fourth, fifth and sixth solar systems are identical in appearance to the first three, but have inverted gravitational force; the time for their red planets also gets reduced to seventeen, fifteen and thirteen seconds. The seventh solar system is also identical in appearance to the first and fourth ones, but has invisible landscapes (as do the next five), and reduces the time for its red planet to eleven seconds - and the eighth solar system reduces the time for its red planet to nine seconds (the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth ones also have inverted gravitational force). After that twelfth solar system, the cycle shall start all over again, and the game will continue until you run out of lives (or fuel, which immediately ends the game regardless of remaining lives).