a completed but damaged Sinistar can be repaired by enemy Workers, extending its lifespan if the player is unable to kill it quickly. Development Sinistar was the first game with stereo sound (in the sit-down version), with two independent front and back sound boards for this purpose. It also uses a 49-way optical joystick that Williams produced specifically for this game. The voice of Sinistar was recorded by radio personality John Doremus and played through an HC-55516 CVSD decoder. Sinistar contains a bug that grants the player many lives (ships). It happens only if the player is down to one life and the Sinistar is about to eat the player's ship. If a warrior ship shoots and destroys the ship at this moment, it immediately takes the player to zero lives, and the Sinistar eating the player subtracts another life. Since the number of lives is stored in the game as an 8-bit unsigned integer, the subtraction from zero will cause the integer to wrap around to the largest value representable with 8 bits, which is 255 in decimal. The 6809 source code for Sinistar is available at https://github.com/historicalsource/sinistar . Reception In 1995, Flux magazine ranked Sinistar 72nd on their Top 100 Video Games. They praised the game calling it: "A truly harrowing arcade classic." Legacy There were no contemporary ports of Sinistar. Versions for the Atari 2600 and the Atari 8-bit family were in progress, but not completed. Sinistar was commercially available in the mid-1990s as part of Williams Arcade's Greatest Hits for the Super NES, Sega Genesis and Saturn, Dreamcast, PlayStation, and Microsoft Windows. It is also available as part of Midway Arcade Treasures for the Xbox, GameCube, and PlayStation 2 in 2003, and for Windows in 2004; part of Midway Arcade Treasures: Extended Play for the PlayStation Portable in late 2005; and part of Midway Arcade Origins for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Sinistar is included in Midway's Greatest Arcade Hits on the Game Boy Advance. A 3D sequel from a different developer and publisher was released for Windows in 1999 as Sinistar: Unleashed. Clones Deathstar is a Sinistar clone for the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron, published by Superior Software in 1984. It was originally developed as an official port to be released by Atarisoft, but they decided to abandon the BBC platform while a number of games were still in development. Sinistaar (1989) is