The moon is under attack from a horde of aliens, and you must stop them in your armed buggy. Drive along the surface shooting the aliens and avoiding their bullets. The surface is not flat, there are craters and rocks to avoid contact with, and landmines on the surface. Flying saucers create new craters when they crash. The 25 restart points are letter-coded.

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Part of the Following Group

Setting: Earth's Moon

Merchant	Title
	Moon Patrol
	Moon Patrol
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User Reviews

Moon Patrolling Fracas!	Apple II	steve Lit (3)
Arcade Perfection!	PC Booter	Indra was here (15040)
A great classic I play to this day.	PC Booter	Tomer Gabel (4418)
The first coin-op game to feature parallax scrolling	Commodore 64	Katakis (37454)

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The Press Says

The Atari Times	Atari 2600	Feb 03, 2002	95 out of 100	95
The Video Game Critic	Atari 2600	Jun 27, 1999	B+	83
Digital Press - Classic Video Games	Atari 2600	Sep 25, 2004	8 out of 10	80
The Video Game Critic	Atari 5200	Nov 20, 2000	B	75
Digital Press - Classic Video Games	Atari 5200	Dec 10, 2003	7 out of 10	70
Pixel-Heroes.de	Commodore 64	Mar, 2007	7 out of 10	70
The Atari Times	Atari 5200	Oct 12, 2006	68 out of 100	68
Power Play	Atari 8-bit	1987	6 out of 10	60
Tilt	Atari ST	Jul, 1988	8 out of 20	40

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Trivia

Cancelled Spectrum version

In one of the stranger moments in Sinclair Spectrum history, a version of this game was completed but never released, despite a great review from Crash! magazine. A handful of copies exist, but never reached a shop floor.

Innovation

According to the 2007 documentary Chasing Ghosts: Beyond the Arcade, Irem's 1982 arcade version of Moon Patrol (distributed in North America by Williams) was the first arcade game to allow gameplay continuation with score retention by inserting another coin. Thus, for the first time, one's high score wasn't solely a matter of how far a player could get on a single coin, but rather a function of how many quarters they wanted to sink into the machine.

Furthermore, the game is credited with introducing parallax background scrolling to video games to imply depth.