Tags: death race arcade game pedestrians pedestrian carnage banned games arcade games 1976 death race
Published : 3 months, 1 week ago (Mon, 25 Aug 2008 07:52:12 PDT)
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Death Race Arcade Game 1976 I remember playing this game at my local arcade in La Mirada, California. I must have been 7 or 8. So it would have been really rare that they actually still had the game considering the ban. It must have been an exception.
Manufacturer: Exidy
Year: 1976
Class: Wide Release
Genre: Driving
Type: Videogame I found an emulated version of this online to download and play. yay!! http://www.roguesynapse.com/games/death_race.php
Originally named 'Pedestrian'. The original design had the player running over pedestrians for points, but Exidy later scrapped it for the less offensive zombies.
Point of the game:
Drive around the field chasing down as many people as possible and run them over, turning them into instant tombstones, before the timer expires. Play with a friend to see who can make more tombstones quicker. After you run someone over, the game designers were nice enough to include a reverse gear to finish the victim off. There was a safe area where the cars cannot enter. The people you must chase look like car racers because they appear to be wearing helmets.
 Exidy's mid-lane targets are shaped like people (little stick-people, mind you), but sensing that the singular goal of smashing fellow human beings, Exidy tried to pass off the figures as gremlins. These gremlins dart around the track, making them tough targets. Successfully steering into these pedestri-gremlins results in little screams and the aforementioned grave markers. These markers soon crowd the track, making racing difficult as you roar around and around.
((*The object to the game was thus similar to the 1997 computer game Carmageddon. In Carmageddon, the player races a vehicle against a number of other computer controlled competitors in various settings, including city, mine and industrial areas. The player has a certain amount of time to complete each race, but more time may be gained by going through checkpoints, collecting bonuses, damaging the competitors' cars or by running over pedestrians.))
The above you video is from the game Carmageddon.
In Death Race the graphics were blocky, black and white, and primitive, but the "gremlins" looked more like stick men and the game's working title had been Pedestrian, so its implication was clear. In spite of Exidy president Pete Kaufman's denial that the intent of the game was to promote violence, Death Race touched off a media onslaught of controversy. The National Safety Council called it sick and morbid. The CBS news program 60 Minutes did a show on the psychological impact of video games. It was also covered on NBC's Weekend news show, in the National Enquirer and Midnight magazine. The controversy increased the game's sales, causing another product run, but the game inspired so many protests—including the first-ever organized protests over a video game, led by Ronnie Lamm—that in the end only about 500 units were made.[citation needed] There were even stories about the stand-up consoles being into parking lots and burned by protesters.
The controversy is also credited with fueling the fledgling arcade industry as a whole. The market had shown signs of stagnation, but in the end 53 new titles from 15 different companies appeared on the market in 1976. There had been 57 titles released in the prior two years combined.
In 1990, an enhanced version of Death Race appeared for the Nintendo Entertainment System, by American Game Cartridges, Inc., a short-lived maker of budget titles. Gameplay was changed somewhat for the NES, moving play into a more visually appealing city and replacing the gravestone obstacles with a shooting helicopter.
The original arcade game itself technically cannot be emulated by a modern arcade emulator such as MAME, as it utilized TTL rather than a microprocessor and ROM. It reused much of the same hardware as Exidy's 1975 game Destruction Derby.
Because of its limited production run and the number of units that were destroyed, Death Race is very rare today. Collectors will sometimes pay $2,000 for a working unit in good condition.
There were only 500 or so made. When it came out it was banned due to its violent content. In the mid-80's there were only believed to be three or four left in existance, but now more are popping up all the time.
In 1978, Exidy released a follow up titled Super Death Chase (the name changed slightly in an effort to escape some controversy). In the sequel, the onscreen targets were already dead.
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