How to play Moon Patrol online
- Speed up / slow down: right and left arrow keys
- Jump: up arrow key
- Fire (forward and upward at the same time): Space bar, which also starts the game
- Choose a game variation: F11 (the console’s Select switch)
- Restart from the beginning of the course: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Music and speed options: F4 and F9 (the difficulty switches, see below)
- Player 2 (two-player games, taking turns): T/F/G/H, fire with A
- Save and load: Ctrl + 0–9 saves to a slot, Alt + 0–9 loads it
Gameplay
Your buggy moves from left to right over a scrolling moonscape. On the ground you meet craters, land mines, rocks, enemy tanks and enemy cars that come up from behind. In the sky, UFOs fire at you, and some of their missiles blast new craters right in front of you. A badly timed jump is as deadly as no jump at all.
There are two courses, each split into 26 segments marked along the way. A gauge fills up as you progress through the five sections of the course, and finishing a section quickly earns bonus points. You start with four buggies. If you lose one, you restart at the segment where you crashed, and the game ends when all are gone. Extra buggies come at 10,000, 30,000 and 50,000 points.
| Target | Jump over | Shoot |
|---|---|---|
| Single crater | 100 | – |
| Double crater | 200 | – |
| Land mine | 50 | – |
| Rock | 80 | 100 |
| Tank | 100 | 200 |
| UFO / crater-making UFO | – | 100 / 200 |
| Enemy car | – | 500, 800 or 1,000 (random) |
Variations and switches
There are six variations: Easy, Medium and Hard, each for one or two players. Easy starts on the first course with fewer craters, mines and UFO missiles, and gets harder slowly. Medium also starts on the first course but ramps up faster. Hard begins on the second course. One difficulty switch turns off the background music; the other chooses whether the buggy has two or three driving speeds.
Tips
- Shoot the crater-makers first. The UFOs that drop crater-making missiles are the most dangerous. Destroy them before they fire, or shoot their missiles in mid-air.
- Jump early over holes. Take off well before a crater so you land just past it, leaving room for a second jump.
- Watch for rocks behind mines. Some spots put a rock right after a mine or crater. Clear the rock with a shot before you land on it.
- Use long jumps. Two obstacles that sit close together can often be cleared in one jump.
History
The arcade Moon Patrol was designed by Takashi Nishiyama at Irem and released in 1982, with Williams distributing it in North America. It is often credited with introducing full parallax scrolling, where background layers move at different speeds to create a sense of depth, and it was one of the top-grossing arcade games in North America by early 1983.
For the 2600, Atari handed the conversion to GCC, the Massachusetts company that later made many of Atari’s home ports. Moon Patrol was one of the first games it produced for Atari, programmed by Noelie Alito, Mark Ackerman and Patty Goodson. Some arcade obstacles, such as boulders and larger pits, were left out; rolling boulders were tried but removed because they bounced instead of rolling. The harder second course, however, made it in.
