Richard Horne Brings Back Atari's Space Race with This Full-Scale 3D-Printed Replica
Fully functional, Space Race now sits alongside Horne's earlier Computer Space replica at the Arcade Archive in the UK.
Heber's Richard Horne has brought another piece of arcade history back to life in full-scale 3D-printed fully-functional replica form: Space Race.
"Space Race was released in July 1973, and it was the first arcade game of the racing genre and the first with an objective to cross the screen while avoiding obstacles," RMC's Neil Thomas explains of the original cabinet. "The game comprises of two players who must navigate a path through the asteroids to reach the top of the screen first. Each time you get to the top you score a point and you start again from the bottom of the screen."
Space Race followed Atari's 1972 smash-hit two-player tennis game Pong, but failed to match its predecessor's popularity. As a result, cabinets are thin on the ground — and you'd certainly know if you saw one, as it's a bizarrely angular design made from fiberglass with embedded glitter. While building a modern replica in the same way would be something of a challenge, there's an easier approach: laser-scanning an original and reproducing it using a 3D printer.
Vintage gaming enthusiast Ed Fries was able to supply a detailed 3D scan of an original cabinet, using an Apple iPhone, which formed the basis of Richard Horne's 3D-printed replica. "[The model] was pretty good," Horne recalls. "The fact it was an iPhone, using the lidar scanner on the iPhone, which is not bad, I was quite surprised how well it came out."
With some work to fix imperfections in the scan, Horne was able to split the model up into 3D-printable segments — then assemble and finish them to match the appearance of the original fiberglass cabinet. "We [ended] up with a whole load of files, about 120 parts, that we [were] able to put on the 3D print farm and print with, basically, scrap PLA," Horne explains. These multicolored parts, printed with filament roll-ends, were assembled, filled, sanded down, and then coated in resin for the smoothest possible appearance.
This isn't the first 3D-printed early-Atari cabinet to grace the halls of the Arcade Archive: back in May last year Horne put the finishing touches to a Computer Space cabinet, Atari's not-terrifically-successful attempt to commercialize the 1962 minicomputer game Spacewar! — popular in university campuses among the computer science types, but much too complicated for a quarter-a-go at your local bar.
The project is detailed in the two videos embedded above, while the cabinet itself is available to play at the Arcade Archive in Gloucestershire, UK — next to both Pong and Computer Space. At the time of writing, the 3D models for the project had not been publicly released.
