Omega Race

About Omega Race

Omega Race (1981) is Midway's only vector-graphics arcade game, in which an Omegan Fighter circles a rectangular track blasting droid ships, a top earner that sold over 35,000 machines.

Omega Race in Depth

In the year 2003, the player pilots an Omegan Fighter around a rectangular "track", destroying enemy droid ships. The ship is rotated with a spinner, with one button for thrust and another for firing lasers. Enemies to destroy or avoid include drone ships, commander ships, two kinds of space mine and shooting star ships. The ship bounces off an invisible barrier at the edges of the screen, which briefly appears when hit, and by default extra ships come at 40,000 and 100,000 points.

Consumer Guide's How to Win at Video Games remarked in 1982 that "any unskilled player can pop a quarter into the machine and stay up there for up to 20,000 points", while Michael Blanchet's How to Beat the Video Games praised its "deceiving appearance", saying that despite looking easy it "develops a healthy level of frustration, which you'll find quite stimulating".

Making Omega Race

Midway Manufacturing developed and published Omega Race for arcades in 1981, and more than 35,000 machines were made. Commodore published ports for the Commodore 64 and VIC-20 in 1982, followed by ColecoVision and Atari 2600 versions from CBS Electronics in 1983. The 2600 version is one of a few CBS cartridges with an extra 256 bytes of RAM, promoted as "RAM Plus". The VIC-20 version was well reviewed: Compute! called it "a real winner for the VIC", BYTE said it "retains all the best characteristics of the arcade version" with fast pace, colourful graphics and good sound, and Ahoy! called it "fairly faithful to the arcade game, and very exciting"; it won a Certificate of Merit for Best Solitaire Computer Game at the 4th Arkie Awards. Temporary Sanity Designs later pitched an update for the Atari Jaguar to Atari Corporation, but it never went beyond the proposal stage.