Space Race is an arcade game developed by Atari, Inc. and released on July 16, 1973.

The game was planned to be quick to create to fulfill an earlier contract with Midway Manufacturing.

The engineering and prototyping was done by Alcorn; after it was completed and the design given to Midway to be released as Asteroid, Atari produced its own nearly identical version as Space Race.

Movement controls are limited to moving the spaceship up or down; if the player's ship is hit by an asteroid it disappears for a few seconds before reappearing at the bottom again.

After leaving Nutting Associates and founding Atari in May 1972, Bushnell spent a few days designing Asteroid, but soon had to drop the project to focus on running the company.

[2][5] Asteroid, codenamed VP-2, was designed to be a racing game that would be simple to create to fulfill an earlier contract with Midway Manufacturing; Atari had initially offered Pong during its development to fulfill the contract, but had been rejected.

[2] When the game was complete, the design was given to Midway to sell as Asteroid, only for Atari to produce a nearly identical version itself titled Space Race, which was released on July 16, 1973.

The cabinet design was distinctive enough that Bushnell considered using it for Pong as well, but the production costs proved too high and only 50 units were made before the design was dropped and Space Race switched to a more traditional rectangular cabinet.

[19][20] In July 2013, Space Race was one of the titles that was sold to Tommo during the Atari bankruptcy proceedings.