Dragonriders of Pern is a video game published by Epyx in 1983 based on Anne McCaffrey's book series of the same name. The game was released for the Atari 8-bit family and Commodore 64. The player acts as the ruler of a "weyr", a mountaintop redoubt where the people of the planet Pern raise dragons in order to protect against periodic invasions of deadly "thread" that falls from a nearby planet. The game is primarily a strategic one, in which the user attempts to form alliances, but it also includes an action portion where the player controls a dragon in an attempt to destroy falling thread.