Spacechase! 

The classic Atari 2600 game from 1981 is now available on PICO-8! Fly your spaceship around to avoid incoming missiles from the hostile alien threat!

To get you in the zone here's the original cartridge flavour text from the absolutely fantastic copywriter at Apollo games studio:

You left Planet Earth just moments ago for routine moon-based primary-satellite scout duty. You are commanding a squadron consisting of three heavily armed Mark 16 Starcruisers. Suddenly you are attacked by alien enemy raiders energizing from the ether...obviously molecularly energized from a distant galaxy. They fire neutron missiles which will destroy your Starcruiser upon impact.

Your mission is to destroy the alien enemy ships until reinforcements can arrive from Planet Earth. These arrive at the approximate rate of one Starcruiser every 10,000 points. The enemy's arsenal also consists of Lazer-Directed Heat-Seeking Proton Missiles which are fired sparingly.

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How to Play

Move your spaceship around with the arrow keys and fire missiles with Z or X.

Press Enter to open the game menu. From here you can change:

• The difficulty level from Easy to Hard
• Choose between levels 1, 2, and 3 to battle different alien ships
• Set either Daytime or Nighttime mode
• Disable flashing lights that appear in the game

You have 3 spare ships left before it's GAME OVER, so avoid those alien missiles!

WARNING: This game contains flashing lights that may be an issue for some players. The flashing lights can be disabled in the game menu by pressing Enter and then setting FLASHING to NO.

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Learn more...

While creating this demake/remake/tribute I came across some great information about it's creation, what it was like to develop games for the Atari 2600 "back-in-the-day", and what the world of video games was like at the time.

You can play the original game here on Atari Online: https://atarionline.org/atari-2600/spacechase

If you want to see the history of the game and the era it was released then click here: https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-2600-vcs-spacechase_11620.html