the tech makes it sound a bit like dragon’s lair, or space ace but looking through that company’s offerings (cinematronics) yields nothing.
i did find this other animated laserdisc game which in subject matter at least sounds a lot like your mystery machine: astron belt.
old fart that i am, i can remember when the very, very first videogames came out, and what we played before (not just pinball). some of those pre-vid games were actually cool. one I was good at was a submarine game, which used a tilted mirror to extend the sight line (i.e. the little ships were actually a couiple of feet down, not a couple of feet ahead). you’d look through a steerable periscope at different ships going by like ducks in a shooting gallery, in a nighttime scene, and since the torpedoes took a few seconds to get to the ship, you had to lead them. a hit lit up a light down in the machine and there was a sound effect, and the ship would tip forward and sink.
another game had a panoramic photo of a layout (like a model train set, with trees and buildings and hills) with model tanks and trucks scattered about. I forget if you were supposed to be in a plane or a tank, but the panoramic photo would slowly scroll by and you would shoot at the targets. pretty primitive, but hey. at the time, that was as high-tech as it got.
as far as video games, after pong, one of the first i saw was that black-and-white ‘death race’ game (you’d run over the little people, euphemistically called ‘gremlins,’ and crosses would appear where you killed them). this game was the grand theft auto of its day, very corrupting. we laughed our asses off when we played it. there was a two-player tank game of similar vintage that was a gas.
and, more recently, one of the most fun games of them all was ‘battle chess,’ played like chess except that instead of capturing an opposing piece, you and your opponent then had to fight it out, using the relative strengths of the pieces. this is a very funny game! f’rinstance i recall my orc (who moves like a pawn) going up aganst a unicorn (which moves like a knight). now the orc, in combat mode, can’t run very fast and can only lash out with his sword; the unicorn can run faster, and fires flaming balls of death out its horn. the orc is toast! except i discovered that i could chase the unicorn around, wildly slashing at his tail. i could never catch him; but he couldn’t shoot me while he was running away. this went on for far, far too long.
i haven’t looked in a while, but there used to be websites with many of these old games published by defunct companies (google ‘orphanware’) which can be run on your computer right now if you have the right emulators. here’s a good site i just found:
http://www.the-underdogs.org/faq.php
note i linked to the faq, not the main page; it’s a good place to start.
yeah, tom, actually that sub game was one of the games in this guy’s basement. it was one of my favorites as well. i also remember death race and battle chess.
anyone remember ARGON? it was sort of like battle chess but you could summon creatures and spirits to use as movable pieces. very cool.
another great game was handheld LCD baseball, which ran off a 9 volt battery and had side compartments where you could secretly choose your pitch (fastball or curveball)
i was also a big fan of the non-tech sports strategy games from avalon hill which used convoluted charts and die rolls to determine the outcome of plays. i still credit those games for developing my love of statistics and charts.
my all-time favorite game, though, was raid over moscow, an original commodore 64 game that featured multiple gameplay engines and culminated in your character shooting a bazooka at commies in st. peter’s basilica.
Just try to get your free mobile games and mini game to enjoy the times.
This is not the droid you’re looking for.