Driving is the one kind of game where everybody already knows the controls. Arcade makers knew it too: their driving cabinets had steering wheels before they had television screens. Once the wheel reached video games it gathered pedals, gear sticks, seats that tipped the player into the bends, and motors that fought back.
Fast facts
- Before video: electro-mechanical driving games with wheels, such as Kasco’s Indy 500 (1968) and Chicago Coin’s Speedway (1969).
- First video wheels: Atari’s Gran Trak 10, March 1974; Taito’s Speed Race the same year.
- Wheel, pedals and gears: Pole Position (1982): two-position gear shift, accelerator, and a brake in the sit-down cabinet.
- Moving cabinet: Out Run (1986), whose hydraulics tilted the car.
- Force feedback: Hard Drivin’ (1989) in the arcade; at home from the late 1990s.
- Early home wheels: Atari’s VCS driving controller (a knob, not a wheel); Coleco’s Expansion Module #2 for the ColecoVision; ThrustMaster’s Formula T-1 for the PC in 1994.
Before and after Gran Trak
Driving games were an arcade fixture in the electro-mechanical era. Wireframe traces the line back to Kasco’s Indy 500 of 1968, played from the driver’s seat, and to Chicago Coin’s American version, Speedway, which it says sold five times as many and inspired Nolan Bushnell. Atari’s first video version was Gran Trak 10 in 1974, a single player with one wheel racing a top-down track against the clock. The Atari Book calls it a “financial disaster”: the game “was so badly engineered that they started coming back to Atari in droves”. Taito’s Speed Race followed the same year with what Wireframe describes as “an unnecessarily massive steering wheel”.
Atari kept making driving games, and the controls grew with them. Lyle Rains, recalling Sprint 2 (1976), said that nobody liked the reverse gear in Gran Trak 20, “so we got rid of reverse and went to a four-speed gearbox. This also got rid of the need for a brake pedal, because lifting off the gas was the brake.”
Pole Position, Out Run and Hard Drivin’
By 1983 the wheel came with a full set of car controls. Electronic Games described Pole Position, which Atari built under licence from Namco: “just a steering wheel and a two-position gear shift for either low or high speed settings”, an accelerator pedal at the base of the upright cabinet, and a foot brake in the sit-down version. “There’s no ignition key to worry about (just a coin slot), nor a clutch.”
Sega’s Out Run moved the seat. Previewing it in January 1987, Computer and Video Games found it “a bit difficult to handle too, as the slightest twitch of the wheel sends the car sliding all over the place. And as it slides the hydraulics take over. The car tilts and slithers from side to side to simulate your movements.”
Atari Games’ Hard Drivin’ made the wheel itself part of the output. ACE played it at its world premiere at a trade show, reporting in April 1989, and described “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”. The force feedback entry follows that idea into home controllers.
Home wheels
The first home “wheel” was a knob. Atari’s driving controller for the VCS turned without stops and reported its movement in Gray code, like an arcade spinner, and Atari’s service manual checks it with the driving game Indy 500. Coleco went further: Expansion Module #2 for the ColecoVision was a steering wheel, dashboard and accelerator pedal sold with Sega’s Turbo.
The PC got a proper wheel and pedals in 1994, when, as Edge put it, “ThrustMaster released the Formula T-1, a steering wheel and foot pedals for driving simulations”. Consoles followed. In August 1996 Edge photographed Mad Catz’s analogue steering wheel for the PlayStation, for games that supported Namco’s twisting NegCon controller, such as Ridge Racer. Force feedback was still on the way: Edge expected force-feedback sticks for the PC by the end of 1996 but thought console versions would come “probably no sooner than 1997”.
By the end of 1998 force-feedback wheels were in the shops. Computer Gaming World said that December that “wheels have been getting better and cheaper lately, and none has excited us more than Microsoft’s Force Feedback Steering Wheel ($199)”. PC Zone’s roundup that Christmas found three motorised models in its test and prices running “from cheapies with a street price of less than £50, through to models costing — gulp — over £150”. It explained what the motors were for: “hit a kerb or another car and you’ll feel a sudden impact; suffer a blow-out and the wheel will judder violently; veer off on to grass and you should feel the control slipping.”
Later wheels
Wheels kept getting closer to the real thing. Logitech’s G25 of 2006 turned through up to 900 degrees and came with a clutch pedal and a six-speed H-pattern gear stick. The German company Fanatec, founded in Landshut in 1997, makes racing wheels, pedals, gear shifters and cockpits.
Sources
- Wireframe issue 66, September 2022, pp. 21–22: Kasco’s Indy 500, Chicago Coin’s Speedway, Gran Trak 10 and Taito’s Speed Race.
- Retro Gamer issue 24 (2006), p. 10: Archer Maclean’s list of early Atari and Kee Games driving games, beginning with Gran Trak 10, March 1974, “1 player, 1 wheel”.
- The Atari Book (Retro Gamer, 2012): Gran Trak 10 returns (p. 74); Dennis Koble and Lyle Rains on Sprint 2 (p. 132).
- Electronic Games, June 1983, p. 95: Pole Position review; Video Games, May 1983: Pole Position’s upright and sit-down cabinets.
- Computer and Video Games issue 63, January 1987: Clare Edgeley’s arcade preview of Out Run.
- ACE issue 19, April 1989, p. 23: Hard Drivin’.
- Atari, 2600/2600A VCS Domestic Field Service Manual (1983): the driving controller.
- Edge issue 35, August 1996, game controller feature: the Formula T-1, the Mad Catz PlayStation wheel and the NegCon, and the outlook for force feedback.
- Computer Gaming World issue 173, December 1998: Holiday Hot 100, Microsoft Force Feedback Steering Wheel.
- PC Zone issue 71, Christmas 1998, “Behind the wheel” (Warren Chrismas).
- Wikipedia, “Logitech G25” (web, secondary): release in 2006, 900-degree rotation, clutch and H-pattern shifter.
- Wikipedia, “Fanatec” (web, secondary): founded in Landshut in October 1997.