the player with the higher score when time runs out. Each game costs a quarter. Machines can be set to play one or two rounds per game, and the time per round is adjustable per machine over a range from 45 seconds to 3 minutes. Development 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 Midway Manufacturing; 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. The engineering and prototyping for Asteroid was done by Alcorn. The game is encoded entirely in discrete electronic components, like Atari's earlier games, and unlike later computer-based arcade games; the graphics are all simple line elements with the exception of the spacecraft, which are generated based on diodes on the circuit board arranged in the shape of half of a ship to represent the shape they create. That half ship is mirrored on the screen, similar to the diode array in Computer Space, which generated eight directions of a rotating ship with a mirrored four images. The game was completed quickly, and Alcorn soon moved on to Atari's third game, Gotcha. When the game was complete, the design was given to Midway to sell as Asteroid, only for Atari to produce a nearly identical version itself titled Space Race, which was released on