Space Duel

The player has five buttons: two to rotate the ship left or right, one to shoot, one to activate the thruster, and one for force field. Shooting all objects on the screen completes a level. Space Duel, Asteroids, Asteroids Deluxe, and Gravitar all use similar 5-button control system.

A key concept of the game was that there were two player ships, not one. At game start, the players could decide whether to play in normal fashion with the one (single player) or two (two player) ships acting independently, or in a second mode where the two were connected together. In the connected mode, one ship firing its thrusters would cause the other to be pulled along, and then continue moving when the thrust was stopped, resulting in them rotating around each other. This mode was mostly used in single-player, as it put two ships on the screen and produced two shots.

Space Duel is included within the Atari Anthology compilation for Windows, Xbox, and PlayStation 2, as well as on the PlayStation version of Atari Anniversary Edition. A port of Space Duel was released on the Atari Flashback 2 console, reproducing only the single-player mode.

A Space Duel cabinet is pictured on the cover of The Who's 1982 album It's Hard.