Most arcade racing games of the 1980s let you hold the accelerator down and steer. Hard Drivin’ made you drive. You climbed into a seat, adjusted it, turned an ignition key, and chose between an automatic gearbox and a manual one with a clutch pedal and four gears, and if you took a corner too fast the car behaved as a car would. The steering wheel fought back. Atari Games built its world from filled polygons rather than scaled pictures, so the road could climb a ramp, leap an open drawbridge and run right round a loop. When it made its world premiere at a London trade show in early 1989, ACE found that Atari was not “just blowing their own trumpet” in calling it “the closest thing to driving without actually being there”: “it really is.”
Fast facts
- Developer: Atari Games; Rick Moncrief led the project, with Max Behensky and Stephanie Mott programming.
- Arcade release: early 1989, after a world premiere at the Amusement Trades Exhibition at Olympia, London.
- Controls: force-feedback steering wheel, accelerator, brake and clutch pedals, four-speed gear stick, ignition key; an adjustable seat in the sit-down cabinet.
- Tracks: a Speed Track and a Stunt Track, with a Championship Lap against the “Phantom Photon”.
- Hardware: a Motorola 68010 main processor, Texas Instruments TMS34010 graphics processors and an Analog Devices ADSP-2100 signal processor for the 3D maths.
- Home versions: Domark under the Tengen label for Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Amiga, PC and Archimedes (1989–90); Tengen for the Mega Drive (1990); Atari for the Lynx (1991).
- Sequels: Race Drivin’ (arcade, 1990) and Domark’s Hard Drivin’ II (home computers).
In the driving seat
ACE’s arcade reporter Andy Smith played it at its premiere on the Atari stand, which was, he wrote, one of the busiest at the show. It had been “some three years in development”. There was no hydraulic motion. Instead, the realism came from the controls: “the centre-feel steering wheel and column that supply continuous feedback as you drive, juddering over rough ground, or yanking your hands all over the shop if the car spins”. Electronic Gaming Monthly’s preview described “a center-feel steering wheel with continuous force feedback, adjustable swivel seat, gas, brake, and clutch pedals, and a four speed stick shift”. A game in the deluxe sit-in cabinet, which had an overhead monitor so that onlookers could watch, might cost up to £1, and ACE thought it “well worth the money”.
The Speed Track was a road circuit with traffic coming the other way, and roadside signs gave the safe speed for each bend. The Stunt Track had three set pieces, in ACE’s words: “a jump across a bridge (Blues Brothers fashion) where exactly the right speed must be reached”, “the astounding 360 degree vertical loop, where the speed must be adjusted on the way through the loop to avoid falling off the ceiling”, and a high banked curve. Each lap had to reach a checkpoint in time. Beat the qualifying time and you raced the Championship Lap against the best driver on record: “the machine remembers the course and time of the best driver on record, who becomes your opponent in a head-to-head race.” Crash, and an instant replay showed the accident from outside the car. Beside the road stood a cow that mooed if you ran into it.
Its reputation for realism grew a story. Several British magazines reported that the game had started life as a simulator for teaching people to drive; The One wrote in April 1989 that “this filled 3D coin-op started life as a genuine driving simulator for tutorial purposes”, and ZZAP! and The Games Machine repeated it when the home versions came out. It was also hard: its innovation, The One wrote, “also happens to be one of its weaknesses”, because you had to learn to drive first. The Sinclair User coin-op column, while calling it “astonishing both in terms of realism and sheer technical achievement”, worried that the lack of variety might give it a short playing life.
How it was built
Jed Margolin, one of the Atari Games engineers on the project, lists the team as Rick Moncrief (project leader), Max Behensky and Stephanie Mott (programmers), himself (engineer) and Erik Durfey (technician). The car’s behaviour came from Doug Milliken, whom Margolin calls “probably the world’s leading expert in car modeling”, and Durfey contributed a moving dashboard; the combination, Margolin wrote, was convincing enough that “some people swear the game has a powered moving seat.”
The hardware was built for 3D. In Margolin’s account and in MAME’s emulation of the board, a 68010 ran the game, a TMS34010 graphics processor drew the picture, an ADSP-2100 signal processor did the graphics maths, and a second TMS34010 was given over to the car model. The One counted “six processors at heart” in 1989 and reported that the machine could display “around 400 polygons every 30th of a second”.
It was not the first arcade game drawn in solid 3D. Earlier in the decade Atari’s own I, Robot had shown what Electronic Games called a “three-dimensional universe of the most delicate, subtle shadings”, and at the same Olympia show Namco had its own polygon racer, the Formula One game Winning Run. The Games Machine gave both games space in its show report, and Namco’s list of releases dates Winning Run to February 1989, the same month Hard Drivin’ reached American arcades. What Hard Drivin’ added was a car you had to handle, in a world built so that you could drive off the road.
Domark’s conversions
Domark signed the home rights early in 1989, and its versions went out under Tengen’s name. Two programmers did most of the work, and ACE interviewed them in January 1990.
Jürgen Friedrich, from Düsseldorf, wrote the Atari ST, Amiga and PC versions. He had got so hooked on Atari’s Star Wars coin-op that he wrote a Macintosh version, and Hard Drivin’ was his second game. He wrote it on the ST in Turbo C, about 70% C and 30% assembler, and found the rotation code the hardest part. Atari helped: “They sent me all the original graphics, exactly as they appear in the coin-op but in Neochrome format, plus a 250K database containing the layouts of all the maps and positions of the objects,” he told The One. Some of the arcade objects had more than 300 points and 100 polygons, so he stripped out details such as headlights and every other road marking, used a simpler version of each object at a distance, and cut the arcade’s palette to the ST’s 16 colours. The 16-bit versions ran at eight to ten frames a second.
Mike Day wrote the Spectrum version in five months, first on a Tatung Einstein and then, when the source code grew too big, on a PC. He spent his first month optimising the polygon routines, and the finished game ran at five frames a second. The Amstrad and Commodore 64 versions used the Spectrum’s program code and data tables; the Archimedes version was written separately.
Prices in ACE’s release box were £9.99 on cassette for the 8-bit machines, £19.99 for the ST and Amiga, and £24.99 for the PC.
The reviews
| Version | Magazine | Score |
|---|---|---|
| Spectrum | CRASH, January 1990 | 92%, a Crash Smash |
| Spectrum | ACE, January 1990 | 921 |
| Spectrum | Your Sinclair, January 1990 | a Megagame |
| Atari ST | The One, December 1989 | 88% |
| Atari ST | ACE, January 1990 | 937 |
| Amiga | ZZAP!, February 1990 | 81% |
| Amiga | Amiga Format, February 1990 | 50% |
| Amstrad CPC | Amstrad Action, February 1990 | 80% |
| Commodore 64 | ZZAP!, December 1990 | 20% |
The Spectrum version surprised people most. CRASH’s reviewers could not “believe our eyes - this game moves at warp factor seven”, and Your Sinclair thought it “no mean technical achievement” to fit a “solid-filled 3D environment a la Freescape” onto the Spectrum at a playable speed, though the loop could make the graphics break up, the 48K version had no sound, and there was no cow. In compensation, the reviewer pointed out, the Spectrum had the skid pan, which the 16-bit versions left out.
The 16-bit games were closer to the arcade but divided the magazines. The One’s Gary Whitta found the coin-op’s feel “recreated authentically” on the ST. Amiga Format’s Andy Smith, who had played the arcade game at its launch, argued that taking away “continuous feedback through the steering wheel and the manual gear-shifting using a clutch” left “a driving ‘simulation’ that is really nothing very special at all”. Amstrad Action liked the “vector grafs at top speed” but not the fact that the screen was “one big grey area”.
The Commodore 64 version was so late that Domark never sold it on its own. It appeared on two compilations, Wheels of Fire and TNT, and ZZAP! gave it 20%: “Now we know why Domark never bothered releasing this in its own right: it’s awful,” wrote Phil King.
In the shops it did well. It was number one in The One’s Atari ST chart for December 1989, and at the Golden Joystick Awards in 1990 it won Best 16-Bit Coin-Op Conversion (see Golden Joystick Awards).
Consoles and the Lynx
Tengen published the Mega Drive version itself; Computer & Video Games reviewed it at £40. Computer & Video Games’ Richard Leadbetter thought “the handling of the car is completely unrealistic, and that realism was the whole point of the arcade machine”, and told racing fans to play the coin-op, “or better still, Race Drivin’”. Atari’s version for the Atari Lynx was due for Christmas 1991. C&VG’s GO! supplement reported that “the bizarre sprite scaling abilities of the Lynx have been used to simulate polygons”, and ACE found the joypad “a poor substitute for a wheel” but the game “remarkably satisfying” once mastered.
Sequels and later life
Atari Games followed it in 1990 with Race Drivin’, which ZZAP! described as having “new tracks (including a spectacular Corkscrew), a choice of cars to drive and a two-player option”. Domark wrote its own home-computer sequel, Hard Drivin’ II — Drive Harder, programmed by Friedrich, with a new track, a track designer and a two-player mode for two computers linked together. Edge saw a new cabinet, Hard Drivin’s Airborne, in 1994 and thought its graphics had not moved on since Race Drivin’; according to Wikipedia it was never released.
Hard Drivin’ came back on consoles in Midway Arcade Treasures 2 in 2004, after Atari Games had become part of Midway, and Race Drivin’ joined the racing-themed Midway Arcade Treasures 3 a year later. When Midway went bankrupt in 2009, the Atari Games catalogue passed to Warner Bros., as the Atari Games entry describes.
A five-disk collection described as the complete source code of the Atari ST version, credited to Jürgen Friedrich, was uploaded to the Internet Archive in January 2024. The upload does not say who released it or under what terms.
Sources
- ACE issue 19, April 1989, pp. 22–23, Andy Smith’s report from the Amusement Trades Exhibition, Olympia: the premiere, three years’ development, the controls and force feedback, the Stunt Track, the Challenge Lap, the £1 price; Namco’s Winning Run at the same show.
- Electronic Gaming Monthly issue 1, 1989, “At the Arcades”: Atari’s description of the cabinet, force feedback, the tracks, the Challenge Lap and instant replay.
- The Games Machine issue 16, March 1989: arcade show report (Hard Drivin’ and Namco’s Winning Run). Issue 26, January 1990: review (“Originally designed as a professional driving simulator”).
- Sinclair User issue 84, March 1989: coin-op column.
- Commodore User, March 1989: “Domark sign Hard Drivin’”.
- The One issue 7, April 1989: arcade review (“started life as a genuine driving simulator for tutorial purposes”; realism as one of its weaknesses). Issue 12, September 1989: work in progress on the 16-bit versions (Friedrich, Atari’s graphics and 250K database, the six processors and 400 polygons, the cuts). Issue 15, December 1989: Gary Whitta’s ST review (88%). Issue 16, January 1990: ST chart.
- ACE issue 28, January 1990, “Hard Driven’”, interview with Jürgen Friedrich and Mike Day; pp. 46–47, Eugene Lacey’s review (ST 937, Spectrum 921) and release box. Issue 33, June 1990: Golden Joystick Awards.
- CRASH issue 72, January 1990, p. 47: Spectrum review (92%).
- Your Sinclair issue 49, January 1990: Spectrum review. Issue 50, February 1990: Megagame.
- ZZAP! issue 58, February 1990: Amiga review (81%) and the driving-instructor story. Issue 68, December 1990: Commodore 64 review (20%), Wheels of Fire and TNT. Issue 70, February 1991: Race Drivin’ and Hard Drivin’ II.
- Amiga Format issue 7, February 1990, p. 34: Andy Smith’s review (50%).
- Amstrad Action issue 53, February 1990, pp. 44–45: review (80%).
- Computer & Video Games issue 110, January 1991: Hard Drivin’ II advertisement. Issue 111, February 1991: Richard Leadbetter’s Mega Drive review. GO! supplement with issue 121, December 1991: the Lynx version.
- ACE issue 54, March 1992: Lynx buyer’s guide.
- Electronic Games vol. 3 no. 1, January 1985, p. 84: Bill Kunkel on I, Robot.
- Edge issue 7, April 1994: Hard Drivin’s Airborne.
- Edge issue 8, May 1994, Namco feature: Winning Run, February 1989.
- Retro Gamer issue 4, 2004: Midway Arcade Treasures 2 line-up. Issue 14, 2005: Midway Arcade Treasures 3.
- Jed Margolin, “Hard Drivin’/Race Drivin’ Schematics”, 9 March 2002 (web, secondary): the team, Doug Milliken, the moving dashboard, the processors. https://www.jmargolin.com/schem/schems.htm
- MAME source code,
src/mame/atari/harddriv.cpp(web, secondary): the 68010, TMS34010, ADSP-2100 and sound boards. https://github.com/mamedev/mame - Spectrum Computing, “Hard Drivin’” (database, web, secondary): Mike Day and Matt Furniss credited for the Spectrum version. https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/2233/ZX-Spectrum/Hard_Drivin
- “Hard Drivin’”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): release dates, credits, Hard Drivin’s Airborne unreleased. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Drivin%27
- Internet Archive, “Game Source Atari ST Hard Drivin”, uploaded 25 January 2024 (web). https://archive.org/details/game-source-atari-st-hard-drivin