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1976 AUTO RACE | Handheld Racing from Mattel Electronics
Some time ago, Jon found this 1976 racing game at a game shop. Let's try it out!
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Mattel Electronics Auto Race was released in 1976 by Mattel Electronics as the first handheld electronic game to use only solid-state electronics; it has no mechanical elements except the controls and on/off switch. Using hardware designed for calculators and powered by a nine-volt battery, the cars are represented by red LEDs on a playfield which covers only a small portion of the case. The audio consists of beeps. George J. Klose based the game on 1970s racing arcade video games and designed the hardware, with some hardware features added by Mark Lesser who also wrote the 512 bytes of program code.
From a top-down perspective, the player controls a car on a three-lane track and moves between them with a switch. Opponent vehicles move toward the player, in an effect similar to vertical scrolling, and the player must avoid them. A second control shifts gears from 1-4, with the speed increasing for each.
Auto Race was followed by other successful handheld sports games from Mattel, including Football and Baseball which were both programmed by Lesser. The design was tweaked into multiple other handhelds, including Missile Attack (1976), which became Battlestar Galactica Space Alert (1978) as a tie-in with the Battlestar Galactica TV series, and Ski Slalom (1980). Auto Race was cloned in the Soviet Union as Elektronika IER-01.
#retrogaming #handheldgaming #handheld #genxgrownup
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? C H A P T E R S
00:00 Auto Race 1976
00:56 Bundle Deal
01:38 Box & Contents
03:19 Hardware Tour
04:47 Power On
05:22 Race One
06:39 Race Two
07:50 Summary
