Racing games are the games in which the player partakes in a racing competition with any type of land, air, or sea vehicles. They may be based on anything from real-world racing leagues to entirely fantastical settings. 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,[5] 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.
Taito released Crashing Race, a simultaneous two-player competitive car racing games 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. Later that year, Sega re-branded the game as Fonz, as a tie-in for the popular sitcom, Happy Days. Both versions of the game displayed a constantly changing forward-scrolling road and the player's bike in a third-person perspective where objects nearer to the player are larger than those nearer to the horizon, and the aim was to steer the vehicle across the road, racing against the clock, while avoiding any on-coming motorcycles or driving off the road.
Micronetics released Night Racer, a first-person car racing games similar to Night Driver, while Sega released Twin Course T.T., an early simultaneous competitive two-player motorbike racing game. Road Champion, released by Taito in 1978, was an overhead-view timed car racing game where players try to race ahead of the opposing cars and cross the finish line first to become the winner.[16] In 1979, Sega's Head On was a racing game that played like a maze chase game and is thus considered a precursor to the 1980 hit Pac-Man. Play Racing Games