Pole Position started as a single drawing. Kazunori Sawano, a Namco designer, had drawn what a game screen might look like, and, as Shinichiro Okamoto remembers it, showed the picture to him soon after he joined the company: “Look, let’s do this.” Three years later Namco had its first video racing game. The player drove a Formula One car around Fuji Speedway, had to set a fast enough qualifying lap to start the race, and raced past other cars and roadside billboards on a road that stretched to the horizon. It reached Japanese arcades in September 1982, and in America, where Atari built it under licence, it led the arcade operators’ earnings charts through the summer and autumn of 1983.
Fast facts
- Developer: Namco; planned by Kazunori Sawano and developed by Shinichiro Okamoto, with the cabinet engineered by Osugi (大杉章), a Namco cabinet designer since 1972.
- Arcade release: Japan, September 1982; in America from late 1982, manufactured by Atari.
- Track: Fuji Speedway, with a qualifying lap and then the race.
- Controls: steering wheel, accelerator, two-position gear shift (low and high); the sit-down cabinet adds a foot brake.
- Hardware: Zilog Z8000 16-bit processors.
- Sequel: Pole Position II (October 1983), with four courses.
- Home versions: Atari 2600, 5200 and 8-bit computers, Vectrex, and Atarisoft’s Commodore 64, BBC Micro and Spectrum versions.
Building it
Namco had made electro-mechanical driving games for years before Pole Position, and Osugi, who had designed their cabinets since joining the company in 1972, engineered this one too. Okamoto, looking back in a Bandai Namco interview in 2019, said the challenge was to take how a real car works and “arrange it into something simple enough to survive being made into a game”. He read up on mechanical engineering to do it. The hardware was new as well: the game used the Zilog Z8000, a 16-bit processor that, according to the same interview, no other video game in the world used at the time. Early versions were hard to control. When the company’s chairman, Masaya Nakamura, tried the prototype, one of the team recalled, he complained “It won’t go straight!” and went home angry.
Qualify, then race
Electronic Games reviewed the Atari version in June 1983 and called it “this year’s champion in the tire-squealing sweepstakes”. The race starts with a qualifying lap that has to be finished “in 73 game seconds or less”; a faster time earns a better place on the grid, and a player who misses the target has only the rest of the qualifying time to play. The race itself is against the clock, “passing cars on all sides and avoiding water slicks sporadically appearing on the track”.
The setting was the point. Earlier driving games, the magazine said, had sent players “down city streets or past scenic landscapes”; Pole Position brought “to life the Fuji Speedway and Grand Prix conditions that even feature roadside signs ala the old Burma Shave placards, only this time updated to reflect the times as well as the companies involved with the game”. In the version British players knew, one of them bore the name of Atari’s own Centipede. When Julian Rignall, Computer & Video Games’ arcade champion, wrote a guide to the circuit in January 1984, he used the signs as landmarks: the hairpin comes after “the infamous ‘centipede’ sign”. His advice for the rest of the lap included: “watch the puddles”.
Racing into the screen was not new. Sega’s Turbo was already in American arcades in 1982, and Video Games described it that October as “an unparalleled three-dimensional video-driving experience”, weaving through a pack of cars (see pseudo-3D road). What Pole Position added was a real circuit and the shape of a Grand Prix: qualify first, then race.
The cabinet
Atari built two versions. The upright had a steering wheel, a two-position gear shift and an accelerator pedal; the sit-down model added a foot brake and, Electronic Games noted, four-channel sound in place of stereo. “There’s no ignition key to worry about (just a coin slot), nor a clutch.” The steering wheel entry follows the controls from here to Out Run and beyond.
Top of the charts
Atari’s advertisements carried the small print that the game was “engineered and designed by Namco Ltd.” and made “under license” by Atari. In June 1983 Video Games counted it among the games that had “proved their popularity and appeal since their introduction in the late fall”. By then it led the earnings charts. In the Play Meter poll of arcade operators that Video Games printed in September 1983, it was the top earning arcade game, with Time Pilot, Millipede and Namco’s Xevious behind it, and Electronic Games listed it at number one in its arcade chart through the autumn of 1983.
Namco followed it in October 1983 with Pole Position II, which added three more courses to Fuji; according to the Bandai Namco interview, the sequel had been planned from the start of the project.
At home
Atari converted the game for its own machines. The Atari 2600 version, Retro Gamer wrote later, “did a fairly good job at emulating its arcade parent” but “looked incredibly sluggish” beside Activision’s Enduro. The Vectrex had a version too. When Atari launched its 7800 console, the pack-in game was Pole Position II.
In Britain the arcade game had been imitated long before the official version arrived; CRASH reviewers used “a ‘Pole Position’ type game” as shorthand. Atarisoft’s versions for the Commodore 64, BBC Micro and Spectrum were advertised in January 1985. CRASH’s reviewers found it “ironical that the original game that has inspired so many versions on the Spectrum should be the last to appear”, and one, who had waited eleven months for it, did not think it “worth the eleven month wait”. A round-up of racing games in May 1985 called it “the ‘real thing’”, “above average as a game, graphically reasonable with good colour”, but held back by its handling and its price.
Legacy
Later racing games were measured against it. Computer Gamer described Sega’s motorcycle game Hang-On as “a sort of super-pole position type display”, and when Out Run arrived in 1986 a British reviewer took care to explain that it was “not some endless variant on Pole Position”: its road went up and down. Namco itself went on to Final Lap and, in 1993, Ridge Racer.
Sources
- Bandai Namco Entertainment, “バンダイナムコ知新 第2回 カーレースゲームの変遷 前編”, interview with 大杉章 (Osugi), Shinichiro Okamoto and Tatsuro Okamoto, 25 April 2019 (web, secondary): Sawano’s sketch, Okamoto’s role, Osugi’s career and cabinets, the three years’ development, the Z8000, Nakamura and the prototype, Namco’s first video racing game, Pole Position II planned from the start. https://www.bandainamcoent.co.jp/asobimotto/page/carracinggames1.html
- Edge issue 8, May 1994, pp. 54–61, Namco feature: the release list (Pole Position September 1982, Pole Position II October 1983, Final Lap, Ridge Racer October 1993).
- Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 16, June 1983, pp. 93–95: Pole Position review (qualifying, the cabinets and controls, the water slicks, the roadside signs).
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 2, October 1982: Sega’s Turbo.
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 9, June 1983, p. 66: Pole Position’s popularity since its introduction in late 1982.
- Video Games vol. 1 no. 12, September 1983, p. 81: Play Meter’s top earning arcade games.
- Electronic Games vol. 2 nos. 7–10, September–December 1983: arcade charts with Pole Position at number one.
- Atari advertisements, Atari Age vol. 1 no. 5, January 1983, and Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 10, December 1983: “engineered and designed by Namco Ltd.”
- Julian Rignall, Pole Position tips, Computer & Video Games issue 27, January 1984, pp. 48–49.
- Retro Gamer, The Atari Book (2012): the 2600 version beside Enduro; Pole Position II as the 7800’s pack-in.
- CRASH issues 2 and 3, March and April 1984: “Pole Position” type games on the Spectrum.
- CRASH issue 12, Christmas 1984/January 1985: Atarisoft advertisement (Commodore 64, BBC and Spectrum, “as well as on all Atari systems”) and review of the Spectrum version.
- CRASH issue 16, May 1985, pp. 44–45: racing games round-up.
- Computer Gamer on Hang-On, and Computer & Video Games on Out Run: see the Hang-On and pseudo-3D road entries and their citations.