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In this paper, discharge characteristics of a planar copper wire array explosion driven by a microsecond pulsed current source (500 J stored energy) in atmospheric air medium were studied. Meanwhile, controlled experiments were performed with single wire cases. With a 2 cm distance between electrodes, 2-16 copper wires with a diameter of 100 μm were selected to form planar copper wire arrays, and single copper wires with diameter of 50-400 μm were selected for comparisons. Load voltage, circuit current and light radiation intensity were measured. Electric power and deposited energy were calculated. The experimental results show that for the single wire case, with the increase of mass (diameter), the process of vaporization and ionization become slower, manifested as a delay of the voltage peak and an increase of the full width half maximum (FWHM) of the voltage pulse from 0.07 μs to 0.64 μs. In contrast, although the explosion time of wire array load was delayed with the increase of mass, the duration of vaporization and ionization did not change significantly with a FWHM of 0.11 ± 0.01 μs. In addition, the deposited energy of wire array load before breakdown was lower than that of single wire load with the same mass. As for the optical radiation intensity, under three cases with the same mass, the peak intensity of wire array explosion is about 28%, 49% and 52% higher than that of single wire explosion. There may be two reasons which cause the difference between the single wire load and wire array load. First, the larger specific surface area of the wire array load makes faster phase transitions. Second, the development of thermal or magnetohydrodynamics for the two kinds of loads was different, which should be responsible for the differences in energy deposition and optical emission.