Death Race © 1990 AGCI
In Death Race, you are driving a heavily armed futuristic vehicle on a cross country race of destruction. Terminate gremlins in the cities along the way and recover the flags to escape in time. Missile silos hound you as their deadly bolts seek your destruction. The technological capabilities of the gremlins increases to nuclear proportions. Launch a volley of your own missiles to create a firestorm eliminating anything in your path.
Armored helicopters with devastating firepower stand between you and your ultimate goal. Between each city, you can use the bounty awarded from all this mayhem to upgrade your car and increase your weapons' destructive power. There are a multitude of new weapons from which to choose.
Death Race was the first Nintendo game that American Game Cartridges worked on in-house. IT was a project lead by James Ferguson. According to John, "It (the helicopter) was originally going to be a computer controlled car that would attack the players, but the AI for effectively navigating the mazes in the game would be to complicated to hold in the Nintendos limited memory. As an off the hand comment, I jokingly said we should just ditch the car and turn it into a helicopter and we wouldn't have to worry about it. Everyone just looked at me for a moment and then we all realized what a great idea it was, so that's what we did."
To promote Death Race, AGCI held a contest. If you were one of the first 100 people to finish the New York stage you were eligible to win a free Death Race remote-control car.
After Death Race, the majority of AGCI's team started working on Shock Wave while Keith Rupp started working on Warp Space.