Space Race

This early Atari game features rocket-shaped players that race upward toward the top of the screen while avoiding the asteroids flying from the left. The player to make the most trips before the timer runs out wins. When a player is struck, his spaceship appears down at the bottom of the screen again. This game was built before the era of "game stories".

The power supply consists of a raw transformer and on-board voltage regulators. The coins fall into a bread pan.

No single-player mode is available. The length of the game is regulated by a timer that begins after the start button has been pressed. Players fly up towards the top of the screen and can control their vertical speed. Asteroids (a one scan line high blob) fly from left to right, and the players avoid the asteroids. Whenever a player is hit, he starts again at the bottom of the screen after a small delay. When a player reaches the top of the screen, he gains a point. The winner is the person with the most points.

Space Race was Ataris second game after Pong. This author spoke to the onetime Atari VP of coinop Steve Chiramontesp who stated that not many of the games were made, and most went into the dump.

The cabinet is unique. The top part enclosing the monitor is white and the bottombase of the cabinet is black. There is no other artwork on the cabinet. The monitor plexiglass has the words Engineered by Syzygy underneath the Atari name.BRBRpWhile almost all Space Race machines were made in a standard cabinet, Greg McLemore, the International Arcade Museum director, was able to find and obtain a fiberglass one, reminiscent of Computer Space.pWhen told of this, Nolan Bushnell the creator of Atari commented, I think we made about 50 space races in fiberglass. One of the problems with fiberglass was that it was difficult to ramp up. One cabinet per day per mould. Each mould cost about 2000 so we decided to only have a few moulds.

The manual is a set of photocopied typewritten sheets with each occurrence of the word Pong scratched out and SPACE RACE written in by hand. Many of the manual sheets use Ataris original name, Syzgy and a logo consisting of a segment of a Go board the game from which Nolan Bushnell later got the name Atari. A red LED, electricaltaped to the bottom of the monitor beneath the plastic lens, indicates a credit is available. Like IPongI, the coins fall into a bread pan. The lock hasps are exposed through cracks and could easily be cut with a hacksaw.PThis game was licenced to BallyMidway and resold as IAsteroidI.

The joysticks are custom and impossible to find. The monitor is a television set converted to a composite monitor, three wires audio, video and ground come from the board an hook to the antenna connectors on the set. The board has no markings on it except for the characters 1066AF. One way to identify this board though is the array of diodes laid out in the form of the left half of the space ship. This was probably the first use of a ROM for a video game, albeit a ROM made of diodes.