3/5 ★ – RawMetal's review of Death Race.

System: Arcade Started: April 13, 2023 Ended: April 13, 2023 Free Play Arcade Session - April 13, 2023: 10/12 As I was on my way to play the next arcade game I planned on playing next, I stumbled across a relic arcade game and I was surprised they have it at Galloping Ghost. An old Arcade game from the 70’s called Death Race, developed by Exidy and I remember hearing about it being the very first controversial game to ever hit the news media. Before Grand Theft Auto, Doom, Mortal Kombat and Night Trap.. Released in 1976 and based on a 70’s movie, Death Race 2000 where contestants participate in driving with their custom weaponized vehicles and kill local pedestrians for points. The arcade cabinet was sitting there for anyone to play and I had to try this out for historical purposes. Based on the instructions for this game on the arcade cabinet. You use the steering wheel and gas pedal to run people over which give you points and you are being timed. The player with the most kills wins. Pretty Simple. When the arcade manual said “Goblins”, I gave a doubtful impression, the characters who are running away from you do look like people and they give off a deathly shrill when they are killed and leave a tombstone cross behind. Already my first impression is the arcade cabinet as a whole. This could possibly be my current favorite marquee art design for its time. Shows two hooded skeletons racing their muscle cars from a haunted house and at a cemetery. It feels so weird to play this artifact from the 70’s but this is a historical object and it still works…Well, sort of. The cabinet has two steering wheels, there's a stick shift that switches acceleration and reverse and the foot pedals which are located on the bottom of the cabinet inside a square gap. The one side for player one barely works that I can accelerate but could not reverse and maybe the stick shift is faulty. The steering wheel works, but it can be a tad pain to turn the wheel at 5 full rotations to make one full turn. At least I ran over some Goblins…or People. I say that the Exidy dev team called them Goblins as an excuse in order to avoid getting this game completely banned from arcades and this was their fail-safe. The game is what it is, nothing bad, nothing good since this is Atari style graphics. Since video games are technologically advanced over the years, this game was shot in the water, but I would’ve enjoyed it if I was around the late 70’s era. I always wanted to know whatever happened to Exidy, the company that developed this game. I found out that Death Race wasn’t the only controversial game they made since there was a light gun shooter, Chiller released a decade later and that was pretty brutal. They even made a computer software called Exidy Sorcerer which looks like a competitor to the Commodore 64 but not that successful. Unfortunately, Exidy was bought out and got acquired by a game company called Mean Hamster Software in the mid 2000’s, then ‘Hamster Software’ went out of business and now Exidy’s name and logo was recently acquired by a indie game company called Collectorvision in 2015. Proud to say that this holds the current record as the oldest game I played in my video game completion catalog and I have never played Pong. I’m sure they have emulations on this especially if its on a browser, but for the actual arcade machine, you might have to go to either a video game museum, retro gaming convention (if lucky that it's playable) or Galloping Ghost to locate this game. If you are a fan of Classic Atari or 70’s games then it's something you’ll love. I even recommend checking out some news footage and articles about the controversial game if you are a fan of history. For others who are not fans of 70’s retro games, then you’ll enjoy the Carmageddon and Twisted Metal franchises since they are the modern version of Death Race.