Whoa, what a blast from the past. My five-year-old daughter was rummaging through an old cabinet and came out with the game that started me on the path to roleplaying when I was a kid. It was a minigame called “Attack Force” that TSR put out in 1982. I even found a pic!
It’s a two-player game with a map and little spaceship chits, where one player is a bunch of starfighters and another is a big space fortress with emplaced guns and some fighters (gee, sound like anything you know?). I bought this in a game store in my local mall and played it, and enjoyed it enough that I went back to the store looking for more stuff like that. And that’s when I came across Star Frontiers, a bigger box from the same company that talked about actually playing heroes in a sci-fi world! I got it and was hooked immediately. Ah, nostalgia.
By the way, you know you can (legally) download Star Frontiers nowadays from starfrontiers.com? Check it out!
Geek Related 
Ha! I had that game too. Note that it doesn’t credit an author on the cover. Was TSR following Atari’s practices of denigrating authorship in favor of the corporate logo?
Yeah, you really have to search through the included rulebook hard to find the designer; it’s not visible from the product exterior in any way – it was David James Ritchie, a board game designer who was working with GMT Games as late as 1994… http://www.boardgamegeek.com/designer/1032