In 1973, Atari's Space Race was a space-themed arcade game where players controlled spaceships that race against opposing ships, while avoiding comets and meteors. It was a competitive two-player game controlled using a two-way joystick, and was presented in black and white graphics. The same year, Taito released a similar space-themed racing game Astro Race, which used an early four-way joystick. The following year, Taito released Speed Race, an early driving racing game designed by Tomohiro Nishikado (of Space Invaders fame). The game's most important innovations were its introductions of collision detection and scrolling graphics, specifically overhead vertical scrolling, with the course width becoming wider or narrower as the player's car moves up the road, while the player races against other rival cars, more of which appear as the score increases. It also featured an early racing wheel controller interface with an accelerator, gear shift, speedometer and tachometer. It could be played in either single-player or alternating two-player, where each player attempts to beat the other's score. The game was re-branded as Wheels by Midway Games for released in the United States and was influential on later racing games. That same year, Atari released another early car driving game in the arcades, Gran Trak 10, which presented an overhead single-screen view of the track in low resolution white on black graphics, on which the player races against the clock around a track to accumulate points; while challenging, it was not competition racing. In 1975, Nintendo released EVR-Race, an early horse racing simulation game with support for up to six players.In 1976, Taito released Crashing Race, a simultaneous two-player competitive car racing game where each player must try to crash as many computer-controlled cars as possible to score points, and the player with the most points wins. That same year, Sega released Moto-Cross, an early black-and-white motorbike racing game, based on the motocross competition, that was most notable for introducing an early three-dimensional third-person perspective.Screenshoots :
