Very interesting. That's one I don't remember, although I do remember playing gaming legend [url=http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/BUDGE.HTM]Bill Budge's[/url] similar death-star-trench-type game on the Apple II. I knew [url=http://www.klov.com/game_detail.php?letter=R&game_id=9326]Rip-Off[/url] as Star Thief on the Apple II. The basis for those games -- having to protect a number of loose objects -- really stuck with me, and I have long wanted to revisit that gameplay. As a side note, when I was originally experimenting with Starbase Defender, I used vector graphics instead of sprites -- much simpler to work with, and they don't distract from the gameplay. One of my goals with Starbase Defender was to make the interface as easy to learn as possible. Pointing and clicking with the mouse is much easier than flying a little asteroids-type ship around, so I went with the stationary guns and the gunsight, which you might say is Missile Command-like. Another game that had a great influence on me as a kid was Sabotage on the Apple II -- I believe you can now play a derivation of it on newer iPods. There's not a lot of "Sabotage" in Starbase Defender, but I did spend a lot of time on the teeny-tiny gun muzzles in part because I remembered the smoothness of the appearance of Sabotage's gun muzzle on the Apple II's 280-pixels-wide display. The first version of Starbase Defender was actually written in 1988 or so on my Apple IIc, in AppleSoft Basic, and was called simply Starbase. There were no cores to defend. It was more like Asteroids except you couldn't move. Not so much fun.