Buzz Aldrin's Race into Space (Race into Space)

Game: Buzz Aldrin's Race into Space (DOS, 1993)

Race into Space: the free software version of Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space, the strategy game about the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, a computer adaptation of Fritz Bronner’s Liftoff! board game developed by Strategic Visions and published by Interplay, on floppy disks and, in 1994, on CD-ROM. It builds on the source code released in 2005 and has been reworked since then. It’s played against the AI or against another person by email (PBEM). 2.0.0 (March 27, 2025), the latest stable release, moved the project from SourceForge to GitHub, converted the code from C to C++, removed the leftover copy protection, fixed the music and many bugs, changed the turn order of play-by-email games so each player plays two turns in a row, and gave both sides the same budget modifiers. Version 2.1, in development, fixes launch movies and replaces the images of the Soviet LK lunar lander with more accurate ones. There are builds for Windows, Linux (.deb, .rpm, and .tar.gz), and macOS. The repository includes all of the game’s data except the music, which, over copyright concerns, is kept in a separate “nonfree” repository it can be added from by hand; according to the 2.0.0 notes, the macOS build has no music, unlike the Windows and Linux ones.

You needNo copy of the game is needed: the project is distributed under the GPL and includes the game’s data, except for the music, which is added separately. Plus Windows, Linux, or macOS; on macOS, sdl12-compat has to be installed with Homebrew, and it builds on macOS 15 or later with Apple silicon.

How it gets to PC

Port of the released source code

Console

MS-DOS

Original studio

Strategic Visions

Year

1993

Author

raceintospace

Stars

237

Last activity

2026-10-29 · 2 days ago

Latest version

v2.0.0 · 2025-03-27

License

GPL-2.0

Language

C++