Racing Game | Code Like It's 198x

Driving is the one kind of game everybody already knows how to play. Arcade owners understood that before there were video games at all. In 1983 Electronic Games remembered the “definitive arcade racing game of the pre-video era”, a sit-down cabinet in which the player gripped “an authentic-seeming steering wheel” and steered a plastic car on a stem over a road painted on a scrolling belt. “What do you mean: what was the object?! The object was to stay on the road.” The magazine thought that for all the technology since, the aim of most racing games “has stayed pretty constant”.

What changed was the view, and then the car. The first video racers looked down on a track from above. By the early 1980s the screen had become a windscreen, with a road running to the horizon. By the end of the decade a second kind of racing game was trying to model how a real car grips, slides and breaks, and in the 1990s texture-mapped 3D carried both kinds into homes.

Fast facts

Before video: electro-mechanical driving games, such as Kasco’s Indy 500 (1968).
Wheel meets video: Atari’s Gran Trak 10, March 1974, a top-down track against the clock; Taito’s scrolling Speed Race the same year.
Facing down the road: Atari’s Night Driver (1976); Sega’s Turbo (1981); Namco’s Pole Position (1982); Sega’s Out Run (1986).
Simulation branch: Geoff Crammond’s Revs for the BBC Micro (1985); Papyrus’s Indianapolis 500: The Simulation (1989, by Computer Gaming World’s and Motor Sport‘s later accounts; on sale by early 1990); Atari Games’ Hard Drivin’ (1989).
Texture-mapped 3D: Namco’s Ridge Racer (1993), Sega’s Daytona USA (1994) and Sega Rally Championship (1995), Sony’s Gran Turismo (1997).
Usual enemy: the clock. Many arcade racers had no rival cars that mattered; the player raced to the next checkpoint before time ran out.

Top-down tracks

Atari’s first video driving game, Gran Trak 10, appeared in March 1974: one player, one steering wheel, a track seen from overhead and a fixed time limit. It was not a happy start. The Atari Book calls it a “financial disaster”, because the machines were so badly built that they came back to Atari “in droves”. Taito’s Speed Race, designed by Tomohiro Nishikado and released the same year, scrolled the road down the screen, and Wireframe’s columnist Mr Biffo credits it as the first vertically scrolling game.

Neither was really the beginning. In the same column Mr Biffo traced driving games back through Atari’s Space Race (1973) to the electro-mechanical games that had inspired Nolan Bushnell, above all Chicago Coin’s Speedway of 1969, a licensed version of Kasco’s Japanese Indy 500 (1968). Indy 500 sold 2,000 machines in Japan, he wrote, and Chicago Coin’s version “sold five times that in the US”.

The top-down game kept going. Atari’s Sprint 2 (1976), programmed by Dennis Koble, let two players race at once and, Retro Gamer wrote in 2012, began “a long-running series for Atari”. Wireframe sees the line continuing in games such as Super Off Road and Code Masters’ Micro Machines (1991), which raced toy cars across desks, pool tables and bathtubs.

Through the windscreen

The view swung round in 1976. Atari’s Night Driver put the player behind the wheel at night, with white markers along the edges of the road. Retro Gamer explained that “the premise that you were driving at night was used to disguise the lack of detail on the road”. Edge later called it “the very first ‘3D’ racing game in history”, but Atari had not invented the idea: Retro Gamer describes it as “a 3D take on the genre licensed from a German company”, identified elsewhere as the 1976 German coin-op Nürburgring 1. Sega’s Road Race of the same year also put the player in first person, and in Wireframe’s account shook its handlebars whenever the player hit another vehicle.

In 1983 Electronic Games thought Night Driver had “failed to dent the arcade on-ramp”. What changed things, it said, was Sega’s Turbo: “Only when Sega dared the laughter of the cynics by marketing Turbo did racing games get a serious second look.” Turbo drove through countryside, cities, tunnels and night, over hills where oncoming cars rose and fell from view. The magazine sorted the genre into four kinds that year: driving games, where the point was to stay on the road; steering games, where it was to dodge things in the road; racing games, where it was to finish first or fastest; and car-battle games, the “really wild ones”.

Namco’s Pole Position, which reached Japanese arcades in September 1982 and led the American earnings charts in 1983, set the pattern for the next few years. It had a real circuit, Fuji Speedway, and made the player set a qualifying time of “73 game seconds or less” before starting the race. In Britain its name became shorthand: CRASH reviewers described Spectrum games as “a ‘Pole Position’ type game” long before the official conversion arrived.

Racing the clock

Arcade racers were usually races against time, not against other drivers. The operator needed each game to end, so the player had a few seconds to reach a checkpoint, and reaching it bought a few more. In Sega’s Out Run the player had 80 seconds to reach the first checkpoint, then 65 for the next, with whatever was left carried forward, and there were no rival racers at all. Out Run sent a red Ferrari down a road that forked at the end of each stage, so the player chose a route through five stages to one of five goals. Taito’s Chase H.Q. (1988) kept the clock but gave the chase a target: a criminal’s car to be rammed off the road before time ran out.

The road these games drew was a trick. Each line of the screen below the horizon stood for one distance ahead, shifted sideways for bends and up or down for hills, with cars and scenery drawn as pictures scaled to their distance. Sega built custom chips to scale those pictures, from Hang-On in 1985 onwards. The pseudo-3D road entry explains how the trick works, and sprite scaling covers the hardware behind it.

Home conversions

Home computers had no scaling hardware, so their programmers did everything in software, and the road came first. “We always do the road first,” Pete Hickinson of Teque Software told The One in 1989, while converting Chase H.Q. to the Atari ST and Amiga: “that’s the central routine that the entire game is based on.” Ocean’s own Spectrum version began with John O’Brien rewriting the road routine from WEC Le Mans to run more than twice as fast, and scored 95% in CRASH.

Results varied between machines. US Gold’s Out Run conversions ran from 93% for the Spectrum version in CRASH to 37% for the Amstrad version in Amstrad Action. When Domark converted Hard Drivin’, whose world was built from solid polygons, the 16-bit versions ran at eight to ten frames a second and the Spectrum version at five. The arcade conversion entry follows that trade more widely.

Simulations

A second kind of racing game took the car more seriously than the arcade did. In spring 1985 Acornsoft released Revs for the BBC Micro, written by Geoff Crammond with the racing driver David Hunt. It modelled a Formula 3 Ralt RT3 at Silverstone, with the circuit’s “curves, dips and hills accurately reproduced”, as Acorn User reported, and adjustable wings “to change the ‘ground effect’”. Acornsoft’s advertisement told buyers to study David Hunt’s circuit diagram before trying for the lap record.

In America, David Kaemmer founded the Papyrus Design Group in the summer of 1987 and began work on Indianapolis 500: The Simulation, published by Electronic Arts. “Nothing like that had really been done over here before,” he told The One. “At the time the market was being flooded with flight simulators.” Computer Gaming World gave the review to a former autocross champion, who listed the adjustable shock absorbers, wheel stagger, camber, anti-roll bars, tyre pressures and wings, and warned: “Gamers looking for immediate gratification should stick to Out Run.”

In the arcade, Atari Games’ Hard Drivin’ (1989) combined a polygon world with a handling model and a steering wheel that fought back, and its Stunt Track ran round a loop-the-loop. Crammond’s own Stunt Car Racer (MicroStyle, 1989) put the handling model on “eight roller coaster-style racing tracks”, according to The Games Machine, with a car winched up by a crane and dropped onto the track for the start.

Texture-mapped 3D

Sega’s Virtua Racing (1992), made by Yu Suzuki’s team on the new Model 1 board, was Sega’s first polygon 3D game. A year later Namco’s Ridge Racer covered its polygons with texture maps. Edge saw it at the Amusement Machine show at Makuhari Messe, near Tokyo, in 1993 and called it the most exciting example yet “of the new era of texture-mapped 3D graphics”. Ridge Racer became a launch game for the PlayStation, and Sega answered with Daytona USA on its Model 2 board.

The two branches of the genre now ran on the same technology. Sega Rally Championship (1995) put rally cars on gravel and mud where they slid “realistically”, in the words of Codemasters producer Guy Wilday, whose Colin McRae Rally was built around that handling. The team behind its Saturn conversion said that Namco’s cars seemed to drift “on invisible rails”, while theirs were “based on physical calculations”. Psygnosis’s WipEout (1995) left the road altogether for anti-gravity craft.

Gran Turismo (1997) went furthest towards the car. Players bought real production cars, passed driving licences and spent their prize money on tuning. Edge gave it ten out of ten for a game that “so brilliantly straddles the divide between a comprehensive simulation and an accessible, incredibly playable arcade game”. By Polyphony Digital’s figures it sold 10.85 million copies, and the series had passed 90 million by 2022.

Sources

Electronic Games vol. 1 no. 5, July 1982, pp. 52–53: driving and racing games (Night Driver and 280 Zzzap as games in which “the television screen becomes the front windshield”).
Electronic Games vol. 2 no. 7, September 1983, pp. 60–66, “The Checkered Flag!”, players’ guide to racing games: the four kinds of car game, the pre-video “car on a stick”, Night Driver, Turbo and Pole Position.
Retro Gamer issue 24 (2006), p. 10: Archer Maclean’s list of Atari driving games (Gran Trak 10, March 1974).
Wireframe issue 66, September 2022, pp. 21–23, Mr Biffo, “Driving games are older than you think”: Speed Race, Gran Trak 10, Space Race, Speedway, Kasco’s Indy 500 and its sales, Sega’s Road Race.
The Atari Book (Retro Gamer, 2012), p. 74: Gran Trak 10 returned to Atari.
Retro Gamer issue 1 (2004), driving-games timeline: Night Driver (1976) and its night setting.
Retro Gamer issue 107, October 2012: interview with Dennis Koble (Night Driver “licensed from a German company”; Sprint 2, 1976).
Edge issue 68, February 1999: Night Driver caption.
“Night Driver (video game)”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Nürburgring 1 as the German game Atari was shown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Driver_(video_game)
Out Run’s checkpoints and review scores, Chase H.Q. and its Spectrum conversion, Pole Position’s dates and qualifying lap, Turbo, and Teque Software’s road routine: see the Out Run, Chase H.Q., Pole Position and pseudo-3D road entries and their citations.
Acorn User issue 35, June 1985, p. 11: “‘Revs’ follows ‘Aviator’ lead” (Silverstone, the Ralt RT3, Geoff Crammond and David Hunt, prices £14.95 and £17.65); Acornsoft advertisement for Revs, also in Computer and Video Games issue 44, June 1985, p. 13.
The One issue 16, January 1990, pp. 93–94: Indianapolis 500 review and Papyrus profile (David Kaemmer, summer 1987).
Computer Gaming World issue 71, May 1990, p. 38: Barry Werger’s review of Indianapolis 500: The Simulation (David Kaemmer and Richard Garcia, Electronic Arts, $49.95).
The Games Machine issue 24, November 1989, p. 89: Stunt Car Racer review. MicroStyle advertisement crediting Geoff Crammond, ACE issue 26, November 1989, p. 74.
Hard Drivin’ and its conversions: see the Hard Drivin’ entry and its citations (ACE issues 19 and 28, The One issue 12).
Edge issue 2, November 1993, p. 16: Ridge Racer at the Tokyo arcade show.
Virtua Racing, Daytona USA, Sega Rally Championship and Gran Turismo: see the Yu Suzuki, Daytona USA, Sega Rally and Gran Turismo entries and their citations.
Gordon Goble, “A New Front Runner In Racing Simulations”, Computer Gaming World issue 115, February 1994, pp. 32–34: Indianapolis 500 in 1989.
Preston Lerner, “The man who made iRacing: Dave Kaemmer’s smash hit”, Motor Sport, October 2021 (web, secondary): Indianapolis 500 in 1989.