Moon Patrol

As a Luna City police officer assigned to Sector Nine, the home of the "toughest thugs in the galaxy", the player controls a lunar rover that travels to the right over the horizontally scrolling surface of the Moon. Craters, mines, and other obstacles on the ground must be shot or jumped over. Three types of flying UFOs attack from above and must be shot down. One of the flying enemies has a weapon which creates a crater when it hits the ground.

Gameplay takes place on two courses, each divided into 26 checkpoints identified with letters of the English alphabet. Of these, the five major checkpoints—E, J, O, T and, Z—denote a new "stage" with a new background and theme; for example, the third stage starts at J and introduces mines. The top portion of the screen shows a timeline-style map of the course, with the major checkpoints marked. Above the map is an indicator of the current checkpoint, the time spent in the stage, and three indicator lights: the top light indicates upcoming enemy aerial attacks, the middle one indicates an upcoming minefield, and the bottom one indicates enemies approaching from behind.

Moon Patrol runs on the Irem M52 8-bit arcade system board manufactured by Irem and was written in assembly language. The M52 system includes:

Z80 @ 3.072 MHz as main CPU

Moon Patrol was among the five top-grossing arcade games on North America's monthly RePlay charts by January 1983.

Moon Patrol received a Certificate of Merit in the category of "1984 Best Science Fiction/ Fantasy Video Game" at the 5th annual Arkie Awards. Arcade Express reviewed the arcade version in January 1983 and scored it 8 out of 10.

Moon Patrol introduced full parallax scrolling. The arcade video game Jump Bug (1981) previously used a limited form of parallax scrolling, with the main scene scrolling while the starry night sky is fixed and clouds move slowly. Moon Patrol has three separate background layers scrolling at different speeds, simulating the distance between them. Taito's Jungle King, also with parallax scrolling, was released a month after Moon Patrol.

The game's designer Takashi Nishiyama went on to create the beat 'em up game Kung-Fu Master (1984).