Space Race (video game)
Development of "Space Race" began soon after the founding of Atari in Summer 1972 under the name "Asteroid". Co-founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney had the initial idea for the game while developing the 1971 "Computer Space", the first arcade video game, but felt the more complicated "Computer Space" was a better first game. After leaving Nutting Associates and founding Atari in May 1972, Bushnell spent a few days designing "Asteroid", but soon had to drop the project to focus on running the company. After the release of "Pong", Atari's first game, development resumed on the title in Spring 1973. Dabney has claimed credit for the game's final design, though "Pong" designer Allan Alcorn has stated that he and Bushnell may have been involved as well. "Asteroid", codenamed VP-2, was designed to be a racing game that would be simple to create to fulfill an earlier contract with Bally Midway; Atari had initially offered "Pong" during its development to fulfill the contract, but had been rejected. The company was also interested in producing a very different game from their previous success, as they felt that innovative design was what would separate them from their competitors, which they saw as flooding the market with "Pong" clones rather than making new video games.
Lunar Lander (1979 video game)
In 1977, Atari produced "Star Ship" for the Atari 2600, which contained several space-related games; one of these was titled "Lunar Lander", though despite the name its gameplay involved landing on a surface while avoiding enemy spaceships instead of the gameplay of the arcade game. While Atari did not produce any true sequels or contemporary ports of the game, in 1981 Adventure International produced a version of the concept under the title "Lunar Lander" as part of a series of arcade game clones for the TRS-80 and Atari 8-bit computers, which, though featuring differences from the Atari version, was advertised as "an arcade game simulation". At least one other arcade game based on the "Lunar Lander" concept was developed around the same time, the non-vector graphics game "Lunar Rescue" by Taito. The Atari "Lunar Lander" has been included in several Atari compilation releases for various platforms starting in 2003, such as "Atari: 80 Classic Games in One" (2003, personal computer), the Atari Flashback 2 console (2005), "Millipede / Super Breakout / Lunar Lander" (2005, Game Boy Advance), "Retro Atari Classics" (2005, Nintendo DS), "Atari Masterpieces" (2005, N-Gage), "Atari Classics Evolved" (2007, PlayStation Portable), "Atari Greatest Hits" (2010, Nintendo DS, Android, iOS), and "Atari Flashback Classics Volume 1" (2017, PlayStation 4, Xbox One).