Air Raid

Air Raid is a 1982 shoot 'em up published for the Atari 2600 by Men-A-Vision, the only game released by the company. The cartridge is a blue T-handle design with a picture of flying saucers attacking a futuristic city. It had extremely limited distribution, making it highly sought after by video game collectors.

The object of this game is to defend the buildings at the bottom of the screen. There are four types of attacking ships moving down the screen. You are moving just above the buildings. The enemies are dropping bombs to try to damage your buildings or destroy you. You must fire missiles up to destroy them. The waves of enemies never ends. The game ends when all three of your ships are destroyed or when both buildings have taken so much damage that they collapse. There are eight game variations. Some where the ships move side-to-side while moving down, some where your shots move to the side when you do, some faster and some with combinations of any or all of these.

On April 10, 2010, the only copy at the time known to be complete (cartridge and box) sold for $31,600. The next known copy to surface on the internet was on October 22, 2011. The eBay auction offered an incomplete version of the game (cart only). Air Raid still sold for an impressive amount of $3,575 US. The transaction was completed, having both parties exchange positive feedback making this the second highest confirmed price paid for the game. On October 24, 2012, the first truly complete game (cartridge, instruction manual and box) was listed for auction and eventually sold for $33,433.30. Due to the media attention that this complete copy brought, on October 26, 2012, a third boxed copy (although without the instruction manual) surfaced on eBay.