The player takes the role of Administrator of NASA or head of the Soviet space program with the ultimate goal of being the first side to conduct a successful crewed Moon landing.

[9] The developers worked to maintain historical accuracy, including all the actual major space hardware and several alternative proposals that were considered at the time, but did make some compromises and simplifications in the name of game balance and avoiding complexity.

[11] Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space has two sides, the United States and the Soviet Union,[4] unlike Liftoff!

[12] Each player controls a space center, which doubles as a navigational menu, and directs funding toward purchasing hardware, research and development, recruiting and training astronauts, and conducting launches.

[4][13] Historical milestones in the game range from launching a satellite,[4] like Sputnik 1, to conducting a lunar orbital mission, like Apollo 8.

Such an error may range from catastrophic mission failure down to no effect (e.g. "The first imprint in the lunar surface is in fact made by a helmet visor.

In November 1990 he met and recruited then 22-year-old Michael McCarty as programmer and formed Strategic Visions as a partnership, but concluded that publishing would be too daunting a task.

However, by September they concluded that the Amiga market was shrinking and decided to change platforms to IBM PC compatible.

It was also around this time that Bronner added the feature of astronaut/cosmonaut skills and morale, which previously made no impact on the performance of a mission.

[23] The game has now been ported to modern operating systems and additional platforms (for instance Pandora[24]), with some improvements over the original.

[25] In October 2014, Slitherine Strategies released the first version of a game titled Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager.

While Interplay[2] and others[27] had billed the game upon its release as being appropriate for children as young as age 10, it drew criticism for being extremely difficult.

[34] It has remained popular enough with fans to spawn an open-source version from the original developers at Strategic Visions in 2005,[35][36] which was downloaded from SourceForge between 2005 and 2017 over 90,000 times.

[39] More significant is the elimination of some minor rocket programs, such as Redstone, and the addition of docking capability to the Voskhod spacecraft.