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The evolution of gaming: computers, consoles, and arcade


Driving games

Night Driver (1976)

Night Driver may have been the first driving game

Hardware: Arcade (custom Atari microprocessor and circuitry, black and white, 336x240 resolution)

Night Driver was an attempt to create a fast-paced driving game with the illusion of 3D, using the limited hardware available at the time. Using off-the-shelf logic chips, Atari put together an extremely simple custom microprocessor and video circuitry that was capable of displaying black and white pixels at high speed. On the bottom of the screen, an artist painted a picture of a car's cockpit on a piece of plastic.

The game was exceedingly simple. All the player had to do was steer the car along the road without crashing off the side. As the game continued, however, the road became narrower and more winding. More points were scored for driving at a higher speed, so the challenge was to race as fast as you can without crashing until the road became too narrow to navigate. The game came with a steering wheel, a four-speed gear shift, and an accelerator pedal. There was no brake.

Pole Position (1982)

Pole Position set many conventions for driving games

Hardware: Arcade (Z80 3 MHz, 128 colors, 256x224 resolution)

Pole Position was an arcade favorite and set the standard for most racing games to come. The player drove a single qualifying lap, then raced against seven other computer-controlled cars in a four-lap race. Victory would earn you a spot on the high score board.

Editor's note: I shudder to think about how many quarters I dropped into this game at the 7-Eleven near my house. Also at the number of Big Gulps and nachos consumed while playing same.

The gear shift was simplified to two settings: High and Low, but a brake pedal was added (although it was rarely used). If the player's car even slightly touched an opponent, both vehicles would explode in spectacular fireballs. You could drive off the road to cut corners, but only for a slight distance until an invisible barrier stopped you from going any further. It was risk to do this, however, as you were likely to run into a road sign and explode. You could lose as many cars as you liked, but near the end of the race even a single explosion would take enough time off the clock to end your game.

Despite persistent rumors, there was no way you could enter in a secret code and drive off to Mount Fuji in the distance.

Hard Drivin' (1988)

Hard Drivin' stressed both realism and fantasy at the same time

Hardware: Arcade (68010 8 MHz, 1024 colors, 640x480 resolution)

Hard Drivin' was a serious attempt at bringing a more realistic driving simulation to the arcades. The steering wheel supported force feedback and thus felt more like driving a real car than the zero-resistance wheels of games past. The physics of driving were accurately modeled by Doug Milliken, the son of William Milliken, widely acknowledged as the world's leading expert in car modeling. A realistic four-speed gear shift and detailed cockpit interior were designed to simulate the driving experience as accurately as possible.

At the same time that all this gritty realism was being put in, the game itself was designed as pure driving fantasy, with giant track loops reminiscent of toy slot-car racers. If you built up enough speed, you could drive upside down on the track and make it safely to the other side. If you were unlucky, your car could run off the track and would crash to the ground upside-down.

The graphics were flat-shaded 3D polygons, rendered in software without any GPU acceleration. While you still couldn't drive off the track completely, you could at least get a little ways away from it before the game forced you to go back.

Virtua Racing (1992)

Accelerated 3D came to racing games with the Virtua series

Hardware: Arcade (NEC V60 16 MHz, plus 68000 12 MHz, Sega AM2 3D chip, 8192 colors, 496x384 resolution)

Sega's Virtua Racing was one of several arcade games in their "Virtua" series, starting with Virtua Fighter, that used the AM2 arcade motherboard commonly referred to as the Sega Model 1. This board was capable of smooth, hardware-accelerated, flat-shaded polygon animation at 30 frames per second. In order to maintain a constant 30 fps, polygons over a certain distance limit from the viewer would "pop in" as the car approached them.

In terms of game play, Virtua Racing lacked the realism advancements of Hard Drivin' and played more like Pole Position. However, touching another car did not mean instant death, merely a loss of speed and time. The greatest advancement was the fact that multiple arcade units could be linked together, so that up to eight human players could race each other at the same time.

Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed (2000)

Despite featuring only Porsches, NFS:PU was state of the art

Hardware: IBM PC (Pentium II @ 400 MHz)

The Need for Speed series actually started life on the doomed 3DO console, but hit its stride when it was released on the PC. In the fifth release, EA inexplicably decided to feature cars from only one manufacturer: Porsche. Despite this limitation, the game itself was quite a bit of fun to play and contained many new features.

All cars and track elements were rendered in accelerated 3D, including the cockpit steering wheel and driving hands. Early in development software rendering was going to be supported, but it soon became clear that requiring 3D acceleration was necessary. An extensive damage model was included, which enabled you to bang up your car in interesting ways and still finish the race. New racing modes were added, including an "Evolution" mode where the player started with the original 1948 Porsche 356 and through winning races, upgraded and sold the car in order to purchase new models when they came out.

The game supported analog steering wheels and force feedback, and multiple players could play over a local area network or the Internet. I was working for EA during this game's development, on the quality assurance team. My assigned area was multiplayer connectivity and game play, which means that if you find a bug in the multiplayer game, it's not my fault. While at EA I had the honor of working with probably the world's best NFS player, Brad Porteous, who actually set the speed lines that the game AI cars would follow (suitably dialed down so that regular humans had a chance of beating it).

Forza Racing (2005)

Forza raced onto the XBOX in style

Hardware: Xbox

  • Pentium III 733 MHz
  • 64 MB shared RAM
  • 250 MHz nVidia GPU
  • 16.7 million colors
  • 640x480 resolution

Microsoft's Forza racing was an effort to one-up Sony's popular Gran Turismo series. The game featured real cars and a mixture of real and imaginary tracks to race them on. Damage modeling was included, as were multiple customization options for your car. Like Porsche Unleashed, there is a "Career Mode" where you start off with a single car and some money and work your way up by upgrading your car and winning races.

Multiplayer support is provided through the XBox Live! service, as well as a split-screen mode and by directly connecting up to eight XBoxes together. Players on Live! can form "Car Clubs" where their stats and information are stored for the purpose of challenging other clubs online.

The driving part of the game is modeled to be more accurate than traditional racers. Tire wear and heat, slipstreaming (following closely behind another car to reduce drag from wind resistance), and damage effects are all taken into account when racing.

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