Did you ever see the game Super Death Chase?! It was basically the same
game, but the guys you ran over resembled more like skeletons.. it was
released in 1978.
No, but I'd like to. I plan on attending California Extreme (a convention
featuring classic arcade games) and hope that the Death Race games are there
for me to study.
There is a game released for Nintendo called Death Race. It is loosely
based
on the movie Death Race 2000.
I have the ROM image to that but I don't have the NES BIOS so I haven't yet
been able to play it on MESS. From what I've read it's like Death Race but
with powerups and other car upgrades ala Super Sprint.
But really, I'm just trying to focus on designing the game so that it is fun
based on the play-pattern, not the cheap thrill of running down pedestrians.
You should be able to forget what those guys are supposed to be and get
into the zone like any good classic game. I like the idea of variations on
driving games where the goal isn't just to win a race. It's something that
hasn't been done a heck of a lot on the 2600, not to mention games that
feature the driving controllers (I think Stellasketch is the only other game
than Indy500 that uses them). So that all contributes to the motivation for
this game.
Death Race's original play pattern was pretty limited. I was never much of
a fan of timed games, so I don't see myself sticking to a faithful port in
the end.
I've thought of lots of ways to make the game deeper.
For instance, if it were wave-based, I could have pairs of waves, one where
you kill X pedestrians, and then a zombie wave where each of the tombstones
(two at a time) revert back to zombies which chases down the nearest car. I
really like the symmetry of that. Or I could have pedestrians occasionally
drop a mine. I've also thought about ways to treat the pedestrians as
belonging to a player, where you try to protect them so that they can get to
the other end, while preventing the pedestrian linked to the other player
from reaching your end. So at any one time you have to make quick decisions
about whether to be defensive or offensive. I don't know what the "story"
behind that would be, but that would give the game more of a complex goal
(like Oystron where you are gathering and protecting pearls while attacking
the enemy).
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