Mattel Auto Race
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.
| Mattel Electronics Auto Race | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Mattel Rockwell International |
| Publisher(s) | Mattel Electronics |
| Designer(s) | George J. Klose |
| Programmer(s) | Mark Lesser |
| Platform(s) | Handheld |
| Release | 1976 |
| Genre(s) | Racing |
| Mode(s) | Single-player |
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.