Space Race and the Great Dash Dodge

While the first year of arcade releases after Pong was dominated by clones, Atari did make a few attempts at original games. The first of these, Space Race, is what I'm going to break down here. Ted Dabney and Nolan Bushnell developed it in an attempt to stand out from the already saturated ball-and-paddle market.

Now I should say at this point that Space Race was not a successful game. It did inspire a clone by Taito, but its sales were small compared to the Pong variants that were dominating the market.

So why am I developing and analyzing it if it did so poorly? Well, at this stage in video game history, almost nothing had been done. If we want to understand how game mechanics evolved over time, it's worth looking at the failures as well as the successes. What's more, many of these early failures were using game models that would eventually be successful in different trappings. That was certainly the case for Space Race, as I will explain later.

Original Gameplay

Unless you have access to one of the original Space Race cabinets (very few do), the closest you will get to the original gameplay is from a Transistor-Transistor Logic (TTL) emulator. The best one out there is DICE[1]. Here's a clip of the original game in DICE:
Sample gameplay from the DICE version of Atari Space Race.
The goal is to cross the asteroid field and reach the top of the screen as many times as you can before time expires. There are always two players (computer players were too logic-intensive for most arcade games without a CPU) and whoever reaches the top more times wins.

Kooky stuff, but I think we can make this. Let's start by creating the asteroid field.

[1] DICE will not run on Windows 8 or later. Fortunately, Windows users can still run it in Compatibility Mode, selecting Windows 7.

Making the Game

Asteroid Field

Okay, calling those asteroids is a mite generous, more like dashes. But hey, let's remember, Dabney and company didn’t have a CPU to work with.

Basically, what we have here is horizontally moving obstacles in evenly spaced rows, all moving at a constant speed. The direction alternates from one row to the next and after an asteroid leaves the screen, there is a brief delay before another one appears in that row. Something like this.
Horizontally moving dashes against a black background. Made to resemble asteroids in Atari Space Race.
I was surprised to see in the emulator that the pattern never changed with time. If that’s accurate, it’s a shame because even the slightest difference in speed between rows would have caused the pattern to shift and lead to more variety in the gameplay. In the BrowGames version, I will keep the pattern constant by default, but you can add variation with the "Asteroid Speed Spread" parameter.

The Ship

Probably the coolest thing about Space Race is not in the game, but rather in the circuit board that's used to run the game.
Comparison of the diode array in the Space Race circuit board to the ship sprite bitmap.
That's right, the diodes used to create the ship sprite are arranged in the shape of a ship on the circuit board. Well, half of one anyway. The developers took advantage of left-right symmetry and constructed the full sprite by placing the half-ship next to a flipped version of the same pattern. The result on the screen is the bitmap shown on the right.

As you can imagine, given the real estate occupied by this diode array, animating the sprite was pretty much out of the question. However, this is still a step up from the paddles and ball that make up a Pong game.

Okay, we have a ship, but how does it move?
Animated demonstration of how the ships move in Atari Space Race.
There is clearly no attempt to simulate gravity here. It is either stationary or moving at a constant speed, up or down. They may have missed an opportunity to make the game more interesting by incorporating gravity physics (even 1958's Tennis for Two did this).

Another thing to notice is how the ship responds to asteroid impacts. Instead of slowing down or losing points, the ship actually disappears from the screen temporarily and then reappears at the bottom. There are no "lives" in Space Race, it is just a race to see who can reach the top more times. So the cost of hitting asteroids is just time.

Other Game Objects

Aside from the ship and the asteroid field, the game also has a timer and a score, both of which are straightforward to implement. The timer is represented by a vertical bar that slowly descends during the game, similar to an hourglass. The score is on the bottom of the screen next to the player it corresponds to. The numbers are in a Pong-style font and increase every time a player reaches the top.

Putting all of these pieces together, here is the result (playable in BrowGames):
Sample gameplay from the BrowGames version of Space Race.

Significance

I expect that the entire industry was watching everything that Atari released at this point in time, even if it wasn't successful. Considering that the market consisted of little but Pong clones in mid-1973, Space Race would have stood out in an arcade.

The only immediate imitator was Taito's Astro Race. I haven't seen any footage of it, but from a flyer, it appears to be a license of the Atari version without any substantial differences.

So it's safe to say Space Race didn't start a craze, a fad, or even a small party for close friends. However, by the late '70s, arcade game developers were much more adventurous (and had CPUs to work with), so this basic design got another look. After the smash success of Space Invaders in 1978, arcades were graced with a slew of crossing shooters. These games retained the shooting gallery feel of Space Invaders, but fused it with a Space Race-style obstacle course. None of the crossing shooters from this era reached classic status, but they were still moderately successful for their time.

Probably the most successful vertical dodge 'em game of all time is Frogger (1982), which graced arcades a little less than a decade after Space Race. Instead of a ship crossing between asteroids, you had a frog avoiding traffic and jumping on logs.

Why did Frogger succeed where Space Race failed? You might be inclined to point to the graphical limitations of early game hardware or the fact that Frogger had a much richer game world, with speeding trucks, diving turtles, and even alligators. However, Pong succeeded with even less graphical flair than Space Race, so I think it runs deeper than that.

At the end of the day, I think the game is just too monotonous. Once you've traversed the asteroid field a few times, it feels like it's just rinse and repeat. The pattern doesn't vary with time, so you see the same set of obstacles over and over. In a follow-up post, I'm going to try to make a computer player for Space Race, and see how an algorithm matches up with a human player at solving this problem. Maybe racing the computer will add a little more spice.

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