Moon Patrol

Moon Patrol is an arcade game made by the Japanese company Irem and released in Japan in June 1982. Williams Electronics sold it in North America under license. The player is a Luna City police officer on patrol in Sector Nine, "home of the toughest thugs in the galaxy", and drives a buggy across the lunar surface from the left of the screen to the right.^[1][2] Molecular Reality Corporation cites it as half the inspiration for its planned game Molecules of Mars.

The buggy has six wheels on three axles, with shock absorbers that let it hop over pits. A joystick that moves only left and right sets its speed, and two buttons fire and jump. A gun on the roof shoots upward and can have four bullets on the screen at once, and a cannon at the front fires ahead and has one. The buggy is destroyed by hitting an obstacle, by an alien bomb, or by falling into a pit.^[1]

The course has 26 checkpoints, each a letter from A to Z, and five stages. The stages begin at E, J, O, T and Z, and each has new background graphics and more danger. A panel at the top of the screen holds a bar that shows how far the buggy has come, and three lights that warn of an air attack, a minefield and enemies approaching from behind. A faster stage earns a bonus. Reaching Z is worth 5,000 points on the Beginner course and 10,000 on the Champion course.^[1]

Craters can only be jumped. Rocks can be shot, though a small one lies below the height of the cannon, and a shot has to explode near it to do any good. After J the Beginner course adds land mines, small objects that flash white and red and must be jumped, usually several in a row. Between P and Q the ground climbs and boulders roll down it. Stationary tanks appear after U and fire back, and a tank's bullet cancels a shot from the buggy, so the player has to fire again at once. UFOs bomb the buggy from above, and some of their bombs dig a new crater where they land. On the Champion course a rocket car trails the buggy from checkpoint A on.^[1]

The mountains in the distance scroll more slowly than the hills in front of them, and the hills more slowly than the ground. Arcade History calls Moon Patrol "the first game to feature parallax scrolling".^[1] A restoration blog is more careful: Alpha Denshi's Jump Bug (1981) used a limited form, it says, and Moon Patrol "uses it more effectively and in the more traditional manner".^[3]

The Irem M-52 board has a Zilog Z80 main processor at 3.072 MHz and a Motorola 6803 for sound, with two AY-3-8910 chips and two MSM5205 chips. The monitor was a 19-inch color raster display.^[1][2] Williams offered an upright and a cocktail cabinet and never published production figures. One restorer estimates from serial numbers that 10,000 to 12,000 machines were made. Takashi Nishiyama, who later designed Kung-Fu Master (1984), is credited as the designer.^[3]

The memo Early Releases on Maxine's Quest gives Molecules of Mars the field of astrobiology and the samples "cyanobacteria, Martian soil simulants", and it sums up the game as "Inspired by: Moon Patrol meets Kim Stanley Robinson's Red-Green-Blue Mars trilogy".^[4] Its black-and-white illustration shows a tracked vehicle on rough ground with a red flower in front of it. The memo does not say what the company took from the arcade game. The Mars trilogy is treated in its own article.

• Molecules of Mars
• Mars trilogy
• Early Releases on Maxine's Quest
• List of works that inspired Molecular Reality Corporation