Pre-Crash Games
Sprint (series)
1974-1989
Designed by Dennis Koble, Robert
Weatherby, Kelly Turner, maybe others
When we talk about classic arcade games, it is amazing that we
tend to forget about an entire era of arcade history. Video gaming did not jump
instantly from Pong in 1972 to Space Invaders in 1978. There were many
games in the intervening years, although only Breakout is really remembered today -- mostly due to its Atari VCS
ports.
Many other early Atari 2600 games were arcade adaptations, renamed for
the system: Combat (formerly Kee
Games' Tank), Air/Sea Battle/Target Fun (Anti-Aircraft in arcades), and the many Pong-likes which made it into Video
Olympics. The Sprint games, the
basis of Indy 500 on the VCS, are especially
notable.
I call the series Sprint,
but the original game was named Gran Trak
10. Atari released no fewer than ten
versions of what amounts to the same game over their history: Gran Trak 10, Gran Trak 20, Le Mans, Sprint 2, Sprint 4, Sprint 8 and Sprint 1 were all pre-classic arcade games.
Some were released under the name Kee Games, a
shell company Atari created to get around distributor restrictions. Amazingly, Atari
Games would return to the series in the late '80s with Super Sprint and Championship
Sprint (both 1986), and Badlands (1989).
While the updates add 16-bit graphics, vehicle upgrades and,
in the case of Badlands,
weapons, they still amount to the same game: a race game with single-screen
tracks and tiny vehicles, steered with a steering wheel controller and a gas
pedal. Take a moment to let the awesomeness of that fact sink in.
 Sprint 1
More awesome yet, even the original games, released a mere two
years after Pong, are quite playable
today. Since then, driving games have picked up a third dimension, cockpit and
behind-the-car perspectives, sprawling tracks, drift mechanics, realistic
damage, tremendously varied vehicles, weapons, navigation tasks, simulated
worlds to drive through, and a slew of other features. But at their core, they all seek to duplicate what Gran Trak 10 did in
1974.
Sprint 8
And one of Sprint's features
has yet to be equaled: Sprint 8 was a
driving game played by up to eight players, around a gigantic monitor table in
the middle, two to a side, all with their own steering wheels and gas pedals.
No, wait; it was equaled once: by Kee Games' Tank 8.
And it wasn't just Atari that followed this successful
formula: Midway's Super Off-Road is
nothing more than a slower Sprint
with bigger tires, turbo boosts, upgrades and multi-level tracks.
While it doesn't seem like it would be that kind of game, Championship Sprint has an end. I've
never seen it myself, for it's one of those games that's fun to play for just a
few minutes at a time, but that doesn't really lend itself to long sessions.
While Badlands
was released in 1989, the game was always a creature of its pre-Space Invaders design ideals.
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The speed was unparalleled for 1978, and featured two steering wheels, as it was meant to be played with one player controlling the front, and another at the back. Unfortunately the game is completely broken if you just play the back end, as the computer will drive the front flawlessly for you, and you have more time to adjust if you're in back, but still, it was pretty neat for the time. I also quite liked how the game would reverse image polarity when you reached a certain point - everything black became white. Goooood times.
Heh heh heh... good one, Ed & Atari. Good one. I hope you're enjoying the fancy car I must have bought for you. :)
There were a few of mistakes I thought that should be corrected.
Asteroids was not the first game to have controls where a ship had left/right buttons and thrusted in the direction the ship was facing. That belongs to what many consider the first video game, Space Wars which was released in the arcade by Cinematronic and pre-dates Asteroids by several years in creation and at least a year in the arcades.
Tramil was not responsible for the Atari 8bit systems. He was at Commodore, making Atari's competitor at the time. He may have been around for a few of the last models.
Also, where did you get the info that Marble Madness used the POKEY chip for its sound? Having programmed the POKEY for many years I would never have guessed it could make those sounds, at least not unassisted.
And Gregg's suspicions are correct: Marble Madness did not use POKEY for sound. That duty was handled by a Yamaha YM2151, the sound chip developed for Yamaha's line of DX synthesizer keyboards. Atari's Marble Madness was the first arcade game to use it.
There is some confusion about Space Wars. Cinematronic's Space Wars was released in 1977, two years before Asteroids. It was inspired by the 1962 DEC PDP-1 computer game Spacewar!, which is sometimes credited as the first video game or graphical computer game (although it missed that honor by decade). Spacewar! was never a coin-op, but another game that was inspired by it was, and it was the first. It was called Computer Space, and like Asteroids, had Spacewar!-like controls. It was released in 1971 and was created by future Atari founders Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney.
In the interest of fairness, I'll mention that the very, very first coin-op video game was another Spacewar! inspired game called The Galaxy Game. It was released two months before Computer Space. Only one them was ever made, and at 10 cents a play on $20,000 worth of hardware, it could never be economically viable, so I'm not sure it should be considered a legitimate coin-op.
Deleted the bit about POKEY being responsible for MM's sounds.
Thanks for the tips.