Scratchenstein creations: Death Race

Hello, its blogging time again and its Halloween again. For the celebratory blog today, i decided to revisit Scratch to attempt to recreate a game ive mention before that was the basis for lost game i discussed previousy, Exidys Death Race!

The flyer for Death Race

Released in 1976, It was the first video game to generate controversy and the first to use shock value as a selling point.

We begin our journey with a recap of the history of Death Race: In 1974, a former Engineer for Monitor and arcade game company RamTek named Pete Kaufmann left the company to form Excellence In Dynamics, or Exidy. Their first games started shipping out at the end of 1974 and in 1975, their games TV Pinball, Table Pinball (the cocktail version of TV Pinball), Table Foosballer, and Destruction Derby were demonstrated at the 1975 MOA Show in Chicago, with Destruction Derby being the popular winner.

Flyer for Exidy's newest titles in 1975

The demand for Destruction Derby was so great that since Exidy was so small, they had to devote their entire production line just to make Destruction Derby. To free up production, they licensed the game to another company called Chicago Coin who produced the game as Demolition Derby.

A flyer for Chicago Coin's Demolition Derby

The only problem was that Chicago Coin was going out of business. So to recoup their investment and to provide a filler game til their next game Car Polo was released, Designer Howell Ivy redesigned the game adding operator-adjustable maximum time-limit of 99 seconds and changed the cars to people and hitting these stick figures the machine would emit a scream sound. 

Death Race Gameplay

The game shipped in January 1976, and 7 months later,  Seattle Associated Press reporter Wendy Walker noticed the game at a local shopping mall arcade. She wrote an article in the paper discussing the games graphic content and pretty soon news outlets in the US, Canada and the UK were covering the game. Even Exidy's assertion that you weren't running over people but rather "gremlins" didn't stop the controversy.

The first article discussing Death Race from the July 3, 1976 of the Daily Oregonian

However, the controversy actually had a complete opposite effect on the game as Exidy went from selling only 200 units to around 3000 units. What was meant to be a filler game sparked the very first controversy involving video games and Exidy became the first video game company to use shock value as a selling point. 

So what I thought id do today was attempt to recreate it in Scratch. Now there already is a recreation available of Death Race, but I decided to do it in scratch as a side project.

Or at least, that was my intention, as I ended up putting it off over work so I ended up having to do it all in 1 day! And trust me, It wasn't easy! Never the less I did at least get it to a playable state.

It's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, IT'S ALIVE! (Err...Sort of!)

So there it is, Not perfect but playable. In someways I did better than with Batari Basic which i made a game recreation out of previously, But its still not quite up to par with a full port. Though its still not far off, all I need to do is:

1.  Fix the countdown timer
2.  Add a 2 player scoring system
3.  sort out the AI
4.  Refine the Controls
5.  Add sounds

I am by no means done with this yet, I will continue to mess around with it and get a proper version of the game. But thats not all, A few months from now im going to use this as the basis for something else, and I think you can probably figure out what that is. But until Happy Halloween, and ill see you next time!