Road Runner (1985)

Road Runner is a variant of the platform genre, based on the Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner shorts. It was developed and released by Atari Games in 1985. Road Runner was ported to the Amstrad CPC, Atari 2600, Atari ST, Commodore 64, DOS, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and NES. Like other NES games released by Tengen, the NES version of Road Runner was released in an unlicensed cartridge.

The player portrays the Road Runner, who must outmaneuver and outsmart Wile E. Coyote while eating seeds along the way in order to stay alive. The game also has full-stereo music scores from Road Runner and other Looney Tunes. One unusual feature is the screen scrolls constantly from right to left, unlike almost every other game that scrolls normally from left to right.

An early original prototype of this game was Laserdisc based, with cartoon intermissions showing at the beginning, in-between levels, and at the end. This was not released to the public, and a regular board based arcade machine became standard.