DEATH RACE 2600

The transcontinental blood sport, brought to you live on the Atari 2600. Your car is the weapon. The pedestrians are the point, or rather, worth points!

It's the year 2600 and the Death Race is the only sport left worth watching, largely because the others have run out of spectators. Drivers tear from New York to Los Angeles under one rule the network is very proud of: the more you run down, the higher you score. Rival racers are fierce competition. At least until you ram them off the road, at which point they are scenery.  Preorder cartridge here soon!

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How to play

• Space bar to fire, Steer with the joystick/cursor keys. The highway does the rest, and it is not on your side.
• Run over pedestrians. They scatter, they wander, they make poor decisions at speed. Line them up and run them down!
• Ram your rival. Trade paint, put them into the wall, take the lead. The rulebook is silent on this, which the committee considers an endorsement.
• Drop-in 2-player: start against the CPU, and a friend can grab joystick 2 at any moment mid-race to throw the AI out of the driver's seat and finish the run themselves. No pause, no menu, no consent required.
• Choose your death machine from the roster, watch your crew board up like professionals who have read their contracts, and launch on 3… 2… 1… GO!

Scoring

The scoring committee rewards sportsmanship, and sportsmanship means picking on someone who can't get out of the way:

• Adult: 1 point. Fit, alert, and frankly a bit of a show-off about it. Barely worth the paperwork.
• Pensioner: 2 points. Double value, half the top speed. The committee calls this "respecting your elders."
• Baby: 5 points. The single greatest scoring opportunity in American motorsport. No, we will not be taking questions.
• Female: +1 on top, whatever they are. They wear pink, which the network insists is a courtesy to the drivers.
• Ramming: 1 point Smash into your opponent and get a free extra point!

A pink baby is 6 points, the highest single act of sportsmanship the rulebook allows. Anyone already flat on the tarmac is worth nothing; the committee only pays for original work.

The road ahead

The highway never stays the same for long. It runs straight (wide, generous, thick with pedestrians who have not been briefed), it weaves (the verges move, you do not get a say), and it forks around islands that put you and your rival on separate roads where neither of you can be helpfully rammed.

The scenery obliges too, region by region: New York → Pittsburgh → St. Louis → Denver → Salt Lake → Los Angeles. Day rolls into night somewhere out west, the sun sets into the horizon, and the crowd back home never once looks away.

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Under the hood

Hand-written 6502 assembly, racing the beam on real VCS hardware, with custom kernels drawing two cars, a shifting road and its pedestrians out of just two hardware sprites, one scanline at a time. 32K of banked ROM, two channels of audio, and 128 bytes of RAM: fewer bytes than this sentence, holding an entire coast-to-coast massacre. Every frame is exactly 262 scanlines, so it won't roll on a real TV, which is the one safety feature in the whole production.

Best played with a CRT and no conscience.