| Most people known about the first coin-op arcade machine released by Atari, Pong! First released in November 1972, and hit the streets in 1973 the game has gone down in gaming history. But do you know what came after Pong? The game Space Race was released in July 1973, the second coin-op game from Atari. The simple game play involved two-players racing to get to the top of the screen from the bottom, avoiding asteroids coming in from the left and the right. The aim of the game was to get to the top to score a point and achieve a better time than your competitor. The game was manufactured in the standard cabinet seen in the advertising on the left, but Atari also released around 50 fibre-glass cabinets designed to look like some kind of space age alien console. |
The manual for the game is a set of photocopied typewritten sheets with the name PONg scribbled out, and Space Race hand-written in its place. Many of the sheets show use Atari's original name Syzgy, which also featured in the cabinets alongside the name Atari. If you are a total arcade geek, a later version from of the manual from 1976 can be view here.
