Autoduel

Autoduel
Cover art
Developer(s)	Origin Systems
Publisher(s)	Origin Systems
Platform(s)	Atari 8-bit family, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Apple II, MS-DOS, Apple Macintosh, Amiga
Release	1985
Genre(s)	Role-playing video game
Mode(s)	Single-player

Autoduel is a 1985 role-playing video game published by Origin Systems for the Atari 400 and 800, Commodore 64, Apple II, Apple Macintosh, and MS-DOS. It was released in 1987 for the Atari ST and in 1988 for the Amiga. It is based on the Steve Jackson Games series Car Wars.

The game is set in a hypothetical future in the Northeast U.S., where cars are a primary means of protection and defense, and the highways are dangerous stretches of land ruled by gangs and vigilantes with armed vehicles.

Autoduel is no longer available for commercial sale. However, since the copyright term is still active, Steve Jackson Games has requested that abandonware sites remove it from their archives.

The player creates a character, naming them and distributing 50 points between three skills: driving, marksmanship and mechanic. The player's character starts in New York, Friday 1-1-2030. Without a car the player has to enter amateur night in which they are provided a vehicle in order to raise enough money to buy and equip their own vehicle. With their own vehicle, a character can begin performing courier missions between the various towns along the Atlantic seaboard—including Syracuse, Boston, Manchester (Origin's headquarters at the time, which could be visited in the game) and Atlantic City among a few. The character may also enter more distinguished Arena events to earn money as well as take to the highways to fight the other cars and salvage their parts. In this sense, the game was very open-ended in what the player could do. The game also had a storyline, involving certain critical courier tasks, such as carrying important criminal evidence against "Mr. Big", through the dangerous terrain between cities.

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Wikipedia