Moon Patrol is the arcade game Irem released in 1982, designed by Takashi Nishiyama: a lunar vehicle rolls forward nonstop across a scrolling landscape, jumping over pits and rocks while firing ahead at ground obstacles and upward at flying saucers attacking from above. It's often pointed to as a pioneer of true parallax scrolling, with three background layers moving at different speeds to simulate depth.
It was one of the most profitable arcade games in North America in early 1983, and Atari brought it to a huge number of home computers and consoles under its Atarisoft label. That parallax effect, taken for granted today in any side-scrolling game, has Moon Patrol as one of its most-cited starting points.
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