The Classic PC Gaming Era (1977-1989) - Racing and Driving Games
Racing games are one of the oldest genres of electronic gaming, and their history showcases the rapid maturity of PC gaming.
Like many of the genres featured in this series, driving and racing games have been a part of video gaming since the 1970s and even appeared on mainframe computers during that time, but in truth, the PC side of the genre didn’t really catch on strongly until the 1990s due to the limits in graphical technology. As a result, many of the racing games people tend to remember from this era are actually ports of arcade games, particularly on the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, which enjoyed some excellent ports of arcade racing games like Buggy Boy and OutRun.
Racing and driving games can be broadly categorized in a few different ways:
Top-down racers, which take place from an overhead perspective and show either a single screen or a scrolling track.
Scrolling racers, which utilize a pseudo-3D effect to set the camera behind the vehicle and scroll sprites in a manner that approximates movement along a road that vanishes into a distant horizon.
First person racers, which often utilize scrolling sprites or polygon graphics to simulate motion and then offer bitmapped interiors laid over the course to provide the illusion of being in the driver’s seat. An offshoot on this genre is simulation racers, which tend to focus on replicating the look and feel of driving an actual car.
Action or combat racers, which function like racing games, but also often involve some sort of action component like vehicular combat, participating in a chase, demolition derby mechanics or running over pedestrians.
Strategic simulation drivers, which take away direct control of the vehicle and instead task the player with setting attributes such as speed and course. These games may also offer other objectives, like delivering a cargo payload or avoiding police.
Sandbox drivers, which allow players to drive a car anywhere they’d like within a map and which offer loose objectives or missions that aren’t necessarily tied to racing.
It’s difficult to define what the earliest driving video game might be because its predecessor, the electronic mechanical driving game, is quite similar in style. The first of these dates back to at least 1954’s Auto Test, where players drove along a filmed route and attempted to keep their car on the road. Many other electro-mechanical games like Indy 500 (1968), Racer (1968), Grand Prix (1969) and Speedway (1969) were developed using similar technology by companies like Namco, Taito, Sega and Chicago Coin.
The first actual video driving game was a built-in title for the Magnavox Odyssey called Wipeout, but it’s pretty much unlike any racing game you might play today due to the reliance on two players and the arcane rules involved that require player one to movie a dot along an overlay track while player two keeps time and the score. In the arcades, Atari may have the earliest claims to a true top-down video game racer with 1973’s Space Race and 1974’s Gran Trak 10, the latter of which had a steering wheel built in the cabinet and an alternate version called Gran Trak 20 with support for two players. (And lest I seem like I’m glossing over the topic here, be assured we’ll definitely cover more about the history of coin-op racing games in our second volume of this series when we’re focused on the arcades more directly.)
In 1976, Atari released Dave Shepperd’s Night Driver on the Virtual Console System, and it’s generally considered to be the first console video game featuring scrolling sprites to produce the pseudo-3D behind-the-car perspective that would come to define the genre for the next two decades. That same year, Sega released a motorcycle-based arcade racing game called Road Race (known as Fonz in North America) that offered a similar tilted behind-the-vehicle perspective of a scrolling and curvy road. Because Road Race and Night Driver were built around mechanics similar to electro-mechanical driving games, it was an easy template for other publishers to utilize to create early arcade games like Vectorbeam’s Speed Freak in 1979, Sega’s Turbo in 1981 and Namco’s highly influential Pole Position in 1982.
Meanwhile, mainframe programmers were creating all sorts of text-based simulations of driving and racing games, including 1973’s Drag, 1974’s Racetrack, 1976’s Road Race and 1977’s Daytona 500, Xcoun and Nomad I. As personal computers such as the Apple II, TRS-80 and Commodore PET became available, simple textual or barely graphical games such as Race, Race Track, Road Race, Road Rally and Ian’s Speed Race appeared.
The first really notable graphical racers for the PC debuted on the Apple II in 1979 with the pseudo-3D Racer and the top-down Country Driver, both of which were amazingly simple and focused on avoiding obstacles. A few other notable games from this era include the Commodore PET’s chase game Police! and racer Car Race ][ (which was developed by Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s eventual CEO), the TRS-80’s peculiar Grand Prix and the Apple II’s electro-mechanical style Hi-Res racer Speedway.
As the graphical sophistication of PCs increased with newer hardware like the Atari 400/800 and the Commodore Vic-20 and 64, driving and racing games diverged into three broad categories: knockoffs or ports of popular arcade games (of which there are too many to list here), genuinely original driving titles that felt like arcade games and more sophisticated simulation-like driving games.
One early original title was the Commodore 64’s Motor Mania, a 1982 UK top-down racer that included different styles of terrain and many obstacles to avoid. HAL Laboratory’s Commodore 64-exclusive Lemans was another 1982 top-down racer with arcade-like objectives, but interesting features like night driving, icy roads and splits. The ZX Spectrum’s 1982 Chequered Flag offered a first-person perspective from behind the wheel along with three different cars to drive. The Apple II’s 1983 Formula I Racer offered a smooth third person behind-the-car perspective with curvy roads, and Epyx’s 1983 Atari 8-bit release Pitstop offered console-quality racing with some light simulation elements regarding fuel and tires. And on the ZX Spectrum, a classic 1983 motorcycle game called Deathchase fused fast-moving racing with combat.
In 1984, the number and quality of PC racing games exploded, particularly on the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, including releases like Richard Petty’s Talladega, Pitstop II, Warp! and Full Throttle. For the next several years, these two platforms were the best places to find great racers, including 1985’s Racing Destruction Set, Speed King and Fast Tracks: The Computer Slot Car Construction Kit, 1986’s Super Cycle and Revs, 1987’s Max Torque, Revs+ and Test Drive, 1988’s Fire and Forget, Grand Prix Circuit, Crazy Cars and X and 1989’s The Duel: Test Drive II, Stunt Car Racer, Chicago 90 and Street Rod.
The late 1980s also brought games created exclusively for 16-bit platforms like the Amiga and Atari ST (as well as sufficiently fast DOS systems). While many were arcade ports, there were also originals including 1988’s Lombard RAC Rally, Turbo, Turbo Cup and 1989’s Harley-Davidson: The Road to Sturgis, RVF Honda, Indianapolis 500: The Simulation, African Raiders-01 and Highway Hawks. These games were not only graphically impressive for their time, but sometimes included simulation or combat elements to separate them from their arcade and console counterparts. Most games were still built using the same scrolling sprite techniques common to so many Pole Position copycats, but the 16-bit systems were capable of rendering much larger and more impressive sprites. Others experimented with polygon graphics for the terrain and sometimes even for the vehicles. While the hardware wasn’t quite up to the task of making sophisticated polygon graphics feel smooth and render at a high framerate, using 3D rendering for terrain allowed for better hills, dips and turns.
As the 1990s dawned, coin-op machines continued to set the major trends for racing, with big games like Sega’s 1993 monster hit Daytona USA, Namco’s visually stunning 1993 franchise-starter Ridge Racer, Midway’s 1994 entertaining highway racer Cruis’n USA and Sega’s 1994 tour de force Sega Rally Championship setting the standard for playability and visual fidelity.
But home consoles were also evolving the genre. The Road Rash series started on the Sega Genesis in 1991 and showed that motorcycle racing could be even more fun with some violence added in. After Nintendo released its 1992 classic Super Mario Kart, the racing genre developed a new fork of casual kart-racing games. The Panasonic 3DO’s 1994 surprise hit Road and Track presents The Need for Speed was so good it was ported to DOS, the PlayStation and the Sega Saturn in short order and also received a rapid succession of sequels once Electronic Arts took over publishing it. The PlayStation also launched Psygnosis’s WipEout series in 1995, and while the series had entries on many other platforms including the Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64, it was so synonymous with the PlayStation that Sony’s buyout of Psygnosis and takeover of the series felt like a natural fit. But perhaps the biggest racing game of the entire decade was Polyphony Digital’s Gran Turismo, an extremely realistic sim-like racer that debuted on the PlayStation in 1997 and put many of the most cutting-edge arcade and PC racers to shame.
And speaking of the PC, there were certainly some excellent early 90s racers like Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix series (originally released in 1991 as World Circuit in North America), Digital Design’s Slicks in 1992, Papyrus’s 1994 NASCAR Racing and 1996 IndyCar Racing II and Delphine Software’s 1997 classic Moto Racer (which was also quite popular on the PlayStation). There were also many (mostly atrocious) FMV racers released during the mid-90s as part of the multimedia wave.
But where the PC truly began to excel was in providing deeper simulations that could accommodate driving accessories and longer runs, especially when they were enhanced with 3D graphics cards and multiple monitors. Modern sim racers like Assetto Corsa, iRacing, rFactor 2, RaceRoom, Forza Horizon 4 and the Project Cars games are often available in some form on consoles, but the genre is taken to a whole other extreme on PCs due to the stronger opportunities for tuning and modding as well as broader accessory support. Virtual Reality sim racing is also an emerging scene that offers a lot of potential due to its immersive qualities.
As Our Series Continues…
In the coming weeks, we’ll talk about racing games, sports games, fighters and brawlers, pinball and paddle games, gameroom games, puzzle games, unusual games and so much more.
And while you’ll definitely see some titles from prominent North American publishers like Sierra On-Line, Infocom, Activision, Electronic Arts, Brøderbund, SSI, MicroProse, Lucasfilm Games, Epyx and Sir-Tech in the mix, you’ll also see references to games from the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Spain and Japan.
If you’ve missed the earlier entries in the series, which cover ASCII games, adventure games, wargames, strategy games and role-playing games, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
Anything I don’t share here will be in my upcoming book, tentatively titled The Greatest Games You (Probably) Never Played Vol. 1. Subscribe to this newsletter so you won’t miss it!