From Spinning Disks to Super Scaler (Racing Games pt. 3)

Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces

This is a continuing history of the evolution of early car racing games as analyzed according to each game's visuo-spatial configuration. Be sure to read part 1 and part 2 before continuing.

Thie post covers the evolution of NAMCO games that foretell Yu Suzuki's "Super Scaler" visual style developed with SEGA.

The Mysterious Racer X

Nakamura Manufacturing Company developed an electromechanical race driving arcade game called The Racer (1970) in Japan. The game was similar to the Chicago Coin game Speedway (1969), covered in in part 2 of this series, although Masaya Nakumura would clarify that the device used for the racecourse is different between the two games ("Projection Racing," Play Meter, Jan 1977, v. 3, n. 1, pg. 13).

The Racer (Nakamura Manufacturing Company, 1970) (image from BANDAI NAMCO group)

The Racer has no video monitor. It projects the image of a spinning plastic race track with independently moving model cars on it onto the screen, giving the player a convincing driver's eye view as if from another car on the track. The game proved to be popular and about one year later, the company started using the more familiar brand name of NAMCO.

Formula-X (NAMCO, 1973)

Three years later, NAMCO scaled up the projection mechanism seen in The Racer for the creation of the massive Formula-X (1973). This game seated the player in life-sized car chassis, complete with an authentic steering wheel and real racing slick tires. The game used a four-gear gearshift and the player could select from three levels of difficulty. The pro level requires the player to use the clutch when shifting gears while the easiest level features an automatic transmission. The cabinet was massive: about 6' wide, 10' long, and 7' tall. Formula-X was installed mostly in bowling alleys as most other types of establishments did not have room for such a large game.

In 1974, NAMCO entered the video game business when the company bought the assets of Atari's flailing Atari Japan division. NAMCO also became the exclusive distributor of Atari games in Japan, but the company continued to design electromechanical games and did not yet start developing video games in house.

F-1 (NAMCO, 1976)

NAMCO repurposed and improved the projection mechanism of The Racer once again for F-1 (1976). This sit-down driving experience had a much smaller footprint than Formula-X, so it could be more easily installed in many locations. Atari licensed the game for the US market, and it proved to be a hit, topping many of the coin-op sales charts in the US and Japan alike.

Dawn of the Dead (United Film Distribution, 1978)

F-1 had some cross-media cultural cache as it was featured in the horror film Dawn of the Dead (1978) (see above).

In an era when most video games were still played on small black-and-white television screens with limited sound effects, F-1 gave players authentic driving controls, loud engine sounds, colorful visuals on a big screen, and a flashing "crash" graphic if they collided with another car. It would be some years before a video game could hope to match that level of immersion and excitement.

Prepare to Qualify

After seeing the success of Space Invaders (Taito, 1978), NAMCO started developing their own video game designs, in addition to licensing titles from Atari. Galaxian (1979), Pac-Man (1980), Rally-X (1980), and Galaga (1981) brought NAMCO international success and experience with digital game development. What Galaxian designer Kazunori Sawano really wanted to make next was a driving game, one to rival the experience of F-1.

Racing game concept sketch credited to Kazunori Sawano (image from BANDAI NAMCO group)

Sawano sketched out what the game should look like (see above), an image of several cars facing away from the viewer driving down a straight road in one-point perspective. The car at the bottom center of the image is labeled "my car" (マイカー). Sawano used that image to enlist fellow designer Shinichiro Okamoto to the project while Okamoto was still working on two NAMCO maze games: Tank Battalion (1980) and Warp & Warp (1981). Programmer Koichi Tashiro from Galaxian and Rally-X also joined the team. None of the team had any real experience with 3-D graphic techniques in games when they started to develop Pole Position (NAMCO, 1982).

Pole Position in Computerspielemuseum, Berlin, by Bsivko (CC BY-SA 4.0) (image source)

It took about three years for the team to complete Pole Position ("BANDAI NAMCO New Insights Part 2: The Evolution of Car Racing Games (Part 1)", BANDAI NAMCO, 25 April 2019, https://www.bandainamcoent.co.jp/asobimotto/page/carracinggames1.html). The high fidelity of graphics involved required that the team use two 16-bit Zilog Z8000 series microprocessors, probably the only arcade game series to use this type of chip. This was an era when a game like Pac-Man still used one 8-bit Zilog Z80 processor.

Pole Position (1982)

The game's visuals were compared favorably to SEGA's Turbo from the previous year. Pole Position used similar techniques to "upscroller" games like Moto-Cross (SEGA, 1976), where a one-point perspective road is drawn to the horizon, then each scanline of the image is adjusted depending on the road curvature, the player car's position on the road, alternation of red/white palette at the road barrier, gray/white palette down the center line of the road, etc. 

Most importantly, what really sets this game apart from Turbo and its predecessors, is that the player navigates the frame moving across the game world instead of an object moving across the screen. The logical interface, the player representation in the virtual world (what Sawano dubbed "my car"), never moves on the screen. The car wobbles, vibrates, animates, pivots, and explodes spectacularly in a collision, but it does not move from its position at the center of the screen. "My car" becomes the player's anchor in the Pole Position world and the screen becomes the windshield on their view of that world.

After Pole Position was completed, all electromechanical racing game projects at NAMCO were cancelled. The video game had finally surpassed the quality level set by F-1.

Pole Position II (1983) quickly went into development on the heels of its predecessor's success with three new racetracks. The games were ported to many computers and home consoles of the era. Yet, NAMCO did not develop another racing game in-house for some years afterward. However, that doesn't mean they didn't publish or license any racing games.

TX-1 (Tatsumi, 1983) sales flyer from Atari

NAMCO licensed and produced TX-1 (1983), an ambitious driving game with three screens developed by Tatsumi Electronics. This widescreen view gives the player an expansive view to the left and right, filling most of their forward vision. The game is sometimes called a "spiritual successor" to the Pole Position family because it is published by NAMCO, and licensed to Atari. The graphic methods used to display the environment are similar to Pole Position with added forking and merging roads, overpasses, tunnels, multiple paths (with a possible influence on Out Run (SEGA, 1986) in the course map design seen above) and smooth transitions between environments (unlike Turbo). 

TX-1 can't render a hairpin turn (image source, Data Driven Gamer)

TX-1 shows the limits of these Pole Position-derived graphic techniques. When the player has such a wide view and enters a hairpin turn, the graphical calculations don't handle the road doubling back toward the viewer (see above).

Buggy Boy/Speed Buggy (Tatsumi, 1985)

The game did well enough for Tatsumi to use the same "engine" for the sequel TX-1 V8 (1984) and the more cartoony off-road (sort of) racer pictured above, Buggy Boy (Speed Buggy in the US, 1985). Tatsumi may have learned the limits of their road renderer as Buggy Boy does not seem to have any hairpin turns.

SEGA in the Race

Before Pole Position, SEGA's Turbo was the big arcade driving hit that gave the player a sense of moving into the depth of the game world with one-point perspective drawing cues and custom hardware for scaling sprites as they recede into the distance.

Buck Rogers and the Planet of Zoom (SEGA, 1982) (image source, Data Driven Gamer)

SEGA repurposed and improved upon the original Turbo arcade hardware in the creation of Zoom 909 (1982) a.k.a. Buck Rogers and the Planet of Zoom (1982). The vertical monitor orientation of Turbo was abandoned for a horizontal orientation a second Zilog Z80 processor and more VRAM memory were added, allowing for many fast-moving sprites and more colors to be rendered on the screen at once. The environment vary from outer space battles, flights over planet surfaces, Death Star inspired trench runs, and the "tunnel" scene shown above. A Japanese sales flyer touts the game for its "pioneering perspective effects" (パースペクティブ効果を初めて採用).

SEGA needed to evolve beyond their 8-bit Z80 microprocessor architecture to meet the high water mark of Pole Position's own "pioneering perspective effects" rendered by dual 16-bit Z8000 series chips. Yu Suzuki worked on a new hardware design that incorporated dual 16-bit Motorola 68000 microprocessors and a suite of dedicated graphics processors that became the first of the "Super Scaler" series of arcade hardware variants.

Hang-On (SEGA, 1982)

Suzuki and his team used the new Super Scaler hardware to create Hang-On (1982). The game is often remembered for its distinct motorcycle-shaped control mechanism that pioneered SEGA's genre of "taikan games" with moving cabinets. This post focuses solely on the game's graphic techniques.

Hang-On was described at the time as having "the superb graphics of a Pole Position style race" (Clare Edgely, "Arcade Action," Computer & Video Games, Dec 1985, pg. 89). The roadside billboards, the shape of the curving road, and the distant mountain range in the background are all similar to Pole Position. The vehicle sprites are bigger and the background has a multiplanar parallax effect for added depth, but the graphic similarities outweigh the differences.

The raw Hang-On road (image source)

Lou Gorenfeld wrote an excellent overview of the graphic techniques used by these games and he extracted the raw road image used in the game (see image above). As described earlier in this post, this image is modified in memory before it is drawn to the screen. Shifting the entire road left or right on the screen gives the impression that the player is steering right or left. The colors of the tarmac, curbstones, and lane dividers alternate along horizontal scanlines to give the illusion of moving down the road. The vertical lines of the road are skewed left or right to give the impression that the road is curving.

It is unclear how much Suzuki was intentionally influenced by Pole Position. When asked what he thinks about other games, he often replies, "I don't play other games" ("TBS Interview with Yu Suzuki: Arcade Game Development at SEGA," X Years Later: Those Who Were Involved (X年後の関係者達), TBS, Feb 2022, translation: https://www.phantomriverstone.com/2024/06/tbs-interview-with-yu-suzuki-arcade.html) ("Interview with Yu Suzuki, Producer of the 'Shenmue' Series," Tokyou Otaku Mode, 1 Sep 2015, https://otakumode.com/news/55c62e97887d92a516b043ae/Interview-with-Yu-Suzuki-Producer-of-the-%E2%80%9CShenmue%E2%80%9D-Series). However, there was a desire to compete directly with NAMCO in their dominant genre, as Suzuki described the situation behind the creation of Hang-On, "Namco had games like Pole Position, and there was a general perception that racing games were Namco's thing. So when [SEGA President] Mr. [Hayao] Nakayama said, 'Don't we have a racing game?' I thought, "I should make one.'" ("Yu Suzuki Interview," Sega Hard Historia, Mar 2021, translation: https://www.phantomriverstone.com/2021/08/march-2021-yu-suzuki-interview-part-two.html ).

Hang-On was just the start for Suzuki and the Super Scaler technology. The next games fulfulled players' fantasies of soaring over a science fantasy world, piloting an F-14 Tomcat, and getting behind the wheel of a Ferrari Testarossa.

Night Driver to Star Raider Evolution (Racing Games Pt. 2)

Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces

This is a continuing history of the evolution of early car racing games as analyzed according to each game's visuo-spatial configuration. Be sure to read part 1 before reading this blog post.

Gran Trak 10 (Atari, 1974), image sourced from this video

As a refresher, Atari pioneered the genre with the arcade game Gran Trak 10 (1974) (shown above). The orthographic overhead view presents the entire race course on the screen in one view - no scrolling needed. As a player, this gives the feeling that you are controlling a remote controlled car from an elevated view, rather than a feeling of being in a car driving it around the track. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; the all-in-one view allows multiple players to share the same screen. This same visuo-spatial configuration was repurposed for Atari's two-player Sprint 2 (1976) (the "2" in the title is for the number of players), and the astounding eight-player Indy 800 (1975) and Sprint 8 (1978).

Indy 800 (1975), from a Kee Games sales flyer

First Person German Engineering

Dr.-Ing. (Doctor of Engineering) Reiner Foerst working on creating a driving simulator when he ended up inventing the first first-person arcade video game. It was nigh impossible simulate a three-dimensional view through a car's windshield using cost-effective 1973-era technology, but Foerst was encouraged when he acquired a Pong (Atari, 1972) arcade machine. The machine was capable of generating white rectangles at different points on the screen. Foerst realized that the rectangles could be repurposed into reflective road markers, illuminated by headlights as one drives along a winding road at nighttime.

Nürburgring 1 (Dr.-Ing. Reiner Foerst GmbH, 1976)

Soon enough, Nürburgring 1 (1976) was born. The game is named for the Nürburgring motorsports track in the German town of Nürburg. Like Gran Trak 10, it includes a steering wheel and gas pedal, but the visuals are completely different. The rectangle "road markers" scale in size and move down the screen in a convincing emulation of driving down a winding road at night.

The graphic techniques are similar to SEGA's Moto-Cross and related games analyzed here. The edges of the road appear to converge in the distance and smoothly adjust left or right to simulate curves in the road. Unlike with other games, Nürburgring 1 has the player navigating the frame across the game world rather than navigating an object on the screen. The front of the driver's car is displayed but it doesn't move. In fact, the car hoodis just part of the plastic screen overlay that includes the speedometer. As the player steers to the right, the road markers move left on the screen in an example of induced movement.

Foerst released a few sequels in the following years, including Nürburgring 2 (1979?) with a motorcycle handlebar replacing the steering wheel and Nürburgring 3 (1980) with a daytime scene and a full color display. In fact, Foerst's company is still working in the car simulation business to this day.

Early Copy Cats

It is said that arcade game developer Ted Michon of Digital Games played an early Nürburgring 1 cabinet in a West German bowling alley and met with Foerst. Upon returning home, he designed a simpler clone version of the game titled Night Racer (1976). Digital Games went out of business by summer 1976 and its assets were bought up by a new company named Micronetics, which manufactured Night Racer. It looks like Micronetics didn't stay in business long, either, as industry magazine Play Meter stopped listing Micronetics' contact info. after January 1978.

Before Digital Games closed its doors, Michon's boss licensed the design to Midway (the video game division of Bally) as Midnite Racer (1976). Midway hired Dave Nutting Associates (not to be confused with Nutting Associates founded by Dave's brother Bill) to develop it. Midnite Racer was renamed as 280 Zzzap (1976) when Midway entered into a tie-in promotion with Datsun for a special edition 1977 Datsun 280Z. 

Atari Takes "Inspiration"

Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell stated in a 2017 interview (pg. 33) that he had planned to make a "driving game" "in a week" based on the same methodology used to create Computer Space (Nutting Associates, 1971). He cited Chicago Coin's electromechanical (EM) game Speedway as a direct influence. This driving game would be "the magnum opus," "the big kahuna" hit game design for his burgeoning new Atari company.  

Speedway (Chicago Coin, 1969), image from this video

Speedway has no video screen. The image of a looping race track is projected from a spinning plastic disk. This gives the game a "3-D effect" with "spectacular realism" according to a Chicago Coin sales flyer. The player steers the red race car left and right to pass six other projected car images moving independently on the track. It is not quite a first-person view, but it was an impressive effect for late 1960s technology.

Bushnell's vision of creating a video arcade version of Speedway took much longer than "a week," and it was Nürburgring 1 that served as the final inspiration. In an undated quote, Atari designer Dave Sheppard remembers being shown "a piece of paper with a picture of a game cabinet" that he remembers being "a German game" with "a few little white squares showing." This was probably Nürburgring 1, and the game may have been "based on a license from a German affiliate" (Atari Inc. - Business is Fun (Goldberg and Vendel, 2012, pg. 211)).

Night Driver (Atari, Oct? 1976)

Sheppard developed Night Driver (1976) using the same techniques as Nürburgring 1. An illustrated plastic overlay over the screen serves as the player car's hood (it's hard to see in the above image. I think the cabinet uses a fluorescent black light hidden under the monitor bezel to illuminate the orange car hood image, but it doesn't appear to be functioning in this example).

This was like Bushnell's vision of a video Speedway, but in some ways better. The Night Driver curves left and right, not just turning left in a circle. The screen flashes bright white if the player crashes into the side of the road. There is only one thing missing in this racer: other cars.

Chicago Connections

At least two of these games made their debut at the AMOA (Amusement & Music Operators Association) show held in Chicago in November 1976. Midway brought Midnite Racer, newly renamed as 280 Zzzap (pronounced "zap"), and Atari debuted Night Driver ("Chicago Chatter" and "Eastern Flashes," Cash Box (18 Dec 1976, pg. 43)). Micronetics may have also featured Night Racer as one attendee noted that there were "about four different night driver games" at the show ("Projection Racing," Play Meter, Jan 1977, v. 3, n. 1, pg. 14).

Midnite Racer sales flyer announcing the name change to 280 Zzzap (Midway, 1976)

In the long run, Atari's Night Driver beat out all competitors in the American market. Play Meter's operator poll of top-earning arcade video games for 1977 ranked 280 Zzzap as #9 and Night Driver as #6 ("Mr. Average and his Operation," Play Meter, Nov 1977, v. 3, n. 21, pg. 25). While 280 Zzzap quickly fell out of the poll rankings, Night Driver was a top 10 earner through 1978 and ranked #11 in 1979.

The Road Home

In 1978, Dave Nutting Associates created a port of 280 Zzzap for Bally's little-remembered home video game console, the Bally Astrocade (a.k.a. Bally Home Library Computer, a.k.a. Bally Professional Arcade, a.k.a. Bally Computer System). It was packaged with an unrelated overhead view racing game named Dodgem.

280 Zzzap/Dodgem for the Bally Astrocade (Bally, 1978)

The home version of 280 Zzzap took advantage of the Astrocade's built-in ability to display 5 x 7 pixel text characters to add text like "FINISH LINE" when a game is complete. The lower HUD displays time remaining, a speedometer (evidently rated in km/h), and distance traveled.

Night Driver for Atari VCS/2600 (Atari, 1980)

In 1980, Rob Fulop ported Night Driver to Atari's home game console, the Atari VCS (later known as the Atari 2600). Fulop made several improvements to the original design by adding color (while still making it look like a nighttime scene), roadside terrain (houses and trees), and oncoming cars with their own headlights (see above). This was another hit for Atari, becoming one of the top-selling VCS games of the year (although it couldn't compare to Fulop's unprecedented hit Space Invaders VCS port (Atari, 1980)).

Atari Leaves Orbit

The "night driver" game formula worked well for creating a fast-moving world from a first person view while restricted by 1970s game graphics technology. The nighttime scene eliminated the need for an environment, background, or horizon line to be displayed; it's too dark to see them! The entire scene is created from scaling, white rectangles: simple "spots" of light that define the edge of the navigable environment. The difficult part was creating a system that calculates the positions to display those spots according to the player's speed and steering, giving the appearance of moving through a continuous, three-dimensional space while traveling across the two-dimensional ground plane of a flat road.

Starship 1 (Atari, 1977)

Atari's Ron Milner, a member of the Night Driver engineering team, used a similar approach when he designed Starship 1 (Atari, 1977). The player flies through the inky blackness of outer space, as distant points of starlight zip past the player. A sales flyer boasts the game's "realistic 3-D graphics" with spacecraft and planets that "[grow] larger as they approach, giving the player the illusion of speeding through space." The control yoke lets the player pitch their view up and down or yaw left and right, creating the illusion of a full, three-dimensional galaxy to explore. An early viewer of the game noted its similarity to Night Driver, stating "the target ships come out at the player much like the pylons on Night Driver do, thereby creating the illusion of depth" ("AMOA Report '77," Play Meter, Dec 1977, v. 3, n. 23, pg. 23, emphasis added).

For all its visual technical prowess, Starship 1 wasn't much more than a target gallery. This was still in the days before Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) set the precedent that video game enemies should feel like a menacing threat. 1977 was the year of Star Wars, and Starship 1 didn't really reproduce the feeling of piloting an X-wing into a dogfight with Imperial TIE fighters. It didn't help that the spaceships in Starship 1 were clearly inspired by Star Trek.

Star Ship (Atari, 1977) was a launch title for the Atari VCS and a home port of Starship 1. However, it does not appear that the game sold well for Atari and it was discontinued within a few years.

Star Raiders for Atari 8-bit computers (Atari, 1980)

Atari engineer Dave Neubauer envisioned mixing a Star Wars-style outer space dogfight with the strategic elements of the text-only mainframe computer game, Star Trek (Mike Mayfield, 1971). He was also inspired by another coin-op game with similar graphics but could not remember the name (maybe Starship 1 or Ted Michon's Star Fire (Exidy, 1978)). Neubauer had experience programming computer-generated starfields in his spare time at his previous job with National Semiconductor. After about six months of diligent work, Star Raiders (1980) was born.

Star Raiders soon became the "must-have" game for Atari 400 and 800 model 8-bit computers. It was a thoughtful mix of short range excitement and long range planning. The game offers multiple views, with a rear view, galactic map view, and a small targeting computer in the lower right corner of the screen. The player's view of the game environment ranges from minutely detailed to galaxy-spanning. The game was ported to other Atari computers and consoles, even an impressive 1982 port for the Atari VCS that required a custom keyboard controller.

Star Raiders paved the way for later important 3-D spaceflight games like Elite (1984), Wing Commander (1990), X-wing (1993), and TIE Fighter (1994) (although David Braben states it did not have a direct influence on Elite: "I know that’s surprising, but the problem is I didn’t have an Atari and none of my friends did."). Star Raiders is often placed on many "most important video games" lists, including the first 10 games of the "game canon" submitted to the Library of Congress.

Epilogue and Prologue

The advent of realtime, three-dimensional, first-person visuals in video games did not start with polygonal graphics. It started with simple shapes, easily repeatable and scalable, that could be moved on a screen to give the impression of embodied, induced movement through a continuous space. This technique was used in evolution from simulated driving on a flat racetrack to the thrill of taking the flight controls and dogfighting in outer space.

In the next blog post, I will examine the evolution of racing games that culminated with the creation of Yu Suzuki's "Super Scaler" SEGA games of fast, 3-D motion using sprite technology. 

Spasim for PLATO (Jim Bowery, 1974)

Like so much of computer game history, there is a precedent that can be traced back to the PLATO computer network. Jim Bowery created (and then deleted, and then recreated) Spasim in 1974 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ground zero for the sprawling PLATO IV network. Billed as "An Investigation of Holographic Space," Spasim is a 32-player multiplayer game of realtime dogfights in space with wireframe polygonal graphics.

Some PLATO games are highly influential, but only a select few people had access to the system (mostly university students). Atari was more influenced by EM games and other video arcade games than by relatively obscure computer games of the day (Spacewar! (1962) and Star Trek (1971) are two exceptions, of course). Spasim is one of the first (if not the first) first-person 3-D spaceflight simulator computer games, but its graphic techniques were not feasible for arcade game technologies until the vector graphics era of Battlezone (Atari, 1980) and Star Wars (Atari, 1983).

Upscroller Game Evolution (Racing Games Pt. 1)

Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces

This is a short history of the evolution of early "upscroller" video games (as mentioned previously, a term coined by Steven Poole, Trigger Happy 2.0, ebook, 2013, chapter 2), better known as "vertically scrolling" games. This type of game has been dominated by the shooter genre, with notable games like River Raid (1982), Xevious (1983), Commando (1985), Raiden (1990), DonPachi (1995), and Ikaruga (2001). But, vertical scrolling got its start in the early 1970s in the car racing genre.

The following analysis focuses on scrolling racing arcade games released by Atari, Taito, and SEGA between 1974 and 1981. This is not an exhaustive analysis of the era, but these examples should show an evolution in graphic styles and technical prowess over these years.

Before the Scroll: Early Car Racing

The earliest known video arcade car racing game is Atari's Gran Trak 10 (1974). It features a fairly realistic steering wheel, gear shift, and gas pedal This game has no scrolling, with the entire racetrack presented on the screen in a fixed frame. The design was successful and Atari (and subsidiary Kee Games) followed it with similar racing titles for many years, like Gran Trak 20 (1974), Formula K (1974), Indy 800 (1975), Sprint 2 (1976), Sprint 8 (1978) and Super Sprint (1986).

Gran Trak 10 (Atari, 1974)
Photo by PresN (image source)

The Ribbon Road (Taito)

Taito game designer and future father of Space Invaders, Tomohiro Nishikado, didn't care for the tight twists and turns of Gran Trak 10's racecourse. He wanted to make a game that was more thrilling, with a greater sense of speed, and turned to his own electromechanical (EM) game designs for inspiration (Alexander Smith, They Create Worlds, pg. 199 - citing information from Florent Gorges' official biography of Tomohiro Nishikado, Space Invaders — Comment Tomohiro Nishikado a Donné Naissance au Jeu Vidéo Japonais!, 2018).

Super Road 7 (Taito, 1970) from this video

Nishikado designed Super Road 7 for Taito back in 1970. This EM game features a "scrolling" two-lane road with scenery projected from acetate drums as the player steers a model car left and right to avoid other cars projected onto the scene. Overlapping another car triggers a crash, causing the player to restart their drive from a standstill.

The scrolling scene is an example of induced movement, where the car appears to be moving forward because the scenery is moving downward. This effect is used in all "upscroller" games, even though the only vertical movement seen is of objects moving down the screen.

Speed Race (Taito, 1974) (image source)

Nishikado's Speed Race plays like a video version of Super Road 7. Dashed lines mark the roadsides, like a "ribbon" zipping down the screen as the player accelerates, creating a great sense of speed and likely the first scrolling video game environment. Like Super Road 7, the player must steer their car left and right on the screen to dodge traffic. The environment and cars are drawn orthographically, as if viewed from directly overhead.

The scenery zooms by, relative to the player's position as well as the car's. Arguably, this gives the player a greater sense of "being there," something closer to the experience of driving an actual car than Gran Trak 10 and similar non-scrolling driving games. Like Gran Trak 10, the overhead view of Speed Race feels flat; there is no sense of depth into the z-space of the screen.

Midway published the game in the US as Racer (1975) and Wheels (1975). Taito added a gear shift lever and a timer to Speed Race DX (1975). The screen was split into two straight racetracks and a second steering wheel allowed for two-player action in Wheels II (1975) and Speed Race Twin (1976). The game was later programmed for a Z80 microprocessor and given color graphics for Super Speed Race (1977). Super Speed Race V (1978) was the #2 top-grossing video arcade game in Japan for 1978 (second only to Nishikado's Space Invaders). Speed Race CL-5 (1978) added forked roads and an illuminated headlight effect for driving in tunnels.

Taito made many refinements and improvements to the Speed Race formula over four years, but the visuo-spatial configuration and navigation control are the same. The cars and road are drawn in plan orthographic view (with some oblique views of foliage) and the player navigates the car object moving on the screen (steer left and right, accelerate up, decelerate down).

That started to change with the next game.

Super Speed Race Jr. (1985)

Taito released Super Speed Race Jr. more than 10 years after the original Speed Race, and this "junior" update added a lot to the series: cartoony graphics, obliquely drawn urban environments, and traffic lights (stop so pedestrians can safely cross the street). One less apparent change is that the player navigates the frame moving across the game world. The player car stays centered on the lower part of the screen. As the player steers left, the game world moves right on the screen, a further example of induced movement. This change in navigation from object to frame is a step towards a more immersive and embodied experience where the player controls their view on the virtual world instead of moving an object on the screen (covered in more detail in the next post).

A Bend in the Road (Atari)

Atari engineers were likely influenced by the scrolling road of the original Speed Race when they developed Hi-way (1975). 

Hi-way (Atari, 1975)

Hi-way takes the straight "ribbon" road of Speed Race and adds curves to it one line at a time. As the road is rendered, scanline by scanline, the x-position of the road image may be adjusted to the left or right. The resulting road curves left or right as it is drawn down the screen. The cars on the road are rendered in a similar way, shearing left or right depending on which way they are veering.

This graphic technique must not have been inspiring for use in other games, probably due to the distorted effect it makes.

SEGA Approaches the Horizon

SEGA released its own series of related upscrolling racing games that are similar to Speed Race. The race car graphics of Road Race (Feb 1976) were soon replaced with motorcycles for Moto-Cross (1976). The game was further revised as Man T.T. (Aug 1976) (named for the annual motocross Tourist Trophy (T.T.) race held on the Isle of Man) and as Fonz (Nov 1976) in the USA. Yes, Fonz is a licensed game named for Henry Winkler's popular Happy Days TV character, Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli. Twin Course T.T. (Jan 1977) uses separate video monitors so two players can race simultaneously, each with their own view of the road.

Moto-Cross (SEGA, 1976), image from a SEGA sales flyer

Each game has minor variations but they all use the same graphical techniques. The road widens from the top of the screen to the bottom, giving a simple impression of road lines converging onto the unseen horizon. The road turns left and right in broad curves that are more convincing than those in Hi-way. The racers (whether race cars or motorcycles) are drawn as if seen from a high angle, but not quite directly overhead. The racer graphics are drawn smaller the closer they are to the top of the screen, as if receding into the distance, thanks to SEGA's custom sprite scaling hardware. This series of games starts to create a sense of depth into the z-space of the screen.

The pioneering haptic feedback (vibrating handlebars during each collision) and inventive graphics must have impressed their audience as these were among the highest-earning arcade games of 1976 and 1977.

Monaco GP (SEGA, 1979)

Two of SEGA's last TTL (transistor-to-transistor logic) logic board arcade games were the successful Monaco GP (1979) and Pro Monaco GP (1980) titles. These two play a lot like the Super Speed Race games and do not incorporate the sense of depth and sprite scaling seen in the Moto-Cross series of games.

Turbo Boost! (SEGA)

SEGA's next big scrolling racer brought back depth effects, incorporated new custom sprite scaling hardware, and is programmed to run on a Z80 microprocessor.

Turbo (SEGA, 1981)

Turbo's roadway recedes to a visible horizon line, where a lateral oblique background image of a cityscape hints at the urban landscape the player will be speeding through. A break in the receding road lines marks a rise in the road (see image above) where encroaching traffic briefly sinks out of view. The road follows the seacoast, curves toward mountains, and leads through dark tunnels and snow-covered forests.

The game has a convincing sense of depth, a good variety of environments, and was one of the highest-earning arcade games of 1981 and 1982. However, the game's design and navigation model still don't stray far from the Speed Race model from 1974, with the player controlling a car object moving around the screen.

Epilogue

Over the first eight years of scrolling racing game history, the spatial structure of games tended to evolve from a flat, orthographic, overhead view into "3rd person view" that mimics a three-dimensional scene with depth. This development did not supplant the original Speed Race model, but supplemented the options that developers had to creating virtual game spaces.

Many early racing games on home consoles and computers use the "scrolling road race" Speed Race model: Freeway for RCA Studio II (RCA, 1977), Street Racer for Atari VCS (Atari, 1977), Road Race for Apple II (Softape, 1978), and Speedway! for Odyssey 2 (Magnavox, 1978). "Car combat" games like Spy Hunter (Bally Midway, 1983) and The Spy Who Loved Me (Domark Software, 1990) add weapons and speedboat sequences to the original formula.

Next blog post, I'll examine a parallel line of development in "first-person view" racing games and how the techniques pioneered in West Germany influenced Atari's early space dogfighting games.

Spatial Models: Discrete vs. Continuous

Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces

Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. (2020). How Pac-Man Eats. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Today, I return to the topic of spatial models in digital games. In his book How Pac-Man Eats, Noah Wardrip-Fruin identified two different models of space that all digital games follow: Continuous Spatiality and Discrete Spatiality. These models are equal to what Espen Aarseth calls Geometrical Topology and Topological Topology, respectfully. I blogged about Aarseth's topologies previously and, although they convey the same concepts, I prefer the Wardrip-Fruin's intuitive naming structure (try saying "topological topology" five times fast). 

As republished in my previous blog post, I describe the differences between the two spatial models in my paper, A Taxonomy of Virtual Dimensions (Rowe, unpublished):

Two of the earliest contenders for the title of “first video game” are Christopher Strachey’s Draughts (1951) and Willy Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two (1958). Each title is pioneering in its own right: Draughts is probably the first game a computer game program and the first computer game with graphics on a cathode ray tube while Tennis for Two is the first known two-player action game. Analyzing these two games for their presentation of spatiality would help us articulate what is important about these two works. 

Discrete Spatiality

Draughts (Christopher Strachey, 1951)

Draughts has what Noah Wardrip-Fruin would describe as Discrete Spatiality. The entire game space is “divided into non-overlapping spaces, and each game action involved moving a piece from one discrete space to another with no in-between position available or meaningful” (Wardrip-Fruin, How Pac-Man Eats, 2020). Each square on the checkerboard is a separate point in space. The checkers do not move between the points as there is no “space” to move through. Many strategy games work in this same manner today. Sprites may animate as if they are moving between spaces, but the game only treats them as being in one space or another, never overlapping multiple spaces.

Continuous Spatiality

Tennis for Two (William Higinbotham, 1958)

Conversely, Tennis for Two is the first example of Continuous Spatiality in a digital game, which “requires that there be many potential positions in the virtual space (so many that moving between them creates a feeling of continuousness)” (Wardrip-Fruin, 2020). It is also worth noting that time in the game is discrete (time tracked by alternating game turns of any length) or continuous in each example.

Any digital game can be classified as using one of these two spatial modes: discrete or continuous.

Spatial Model Classification Edge Cases

For most digital games, the spatial model used is obvious. Text adventure, strategy, and digital board games tend to use discrete spatiality while action and sports games often use continuous spatiality. However, there are some edge cases that are not immediately obvious.

Ataxx

Ataxx (Leland Corporation, 1990)

Ataxx is a turn-based arcade game played on a 7 x 7 grid and is similar to the board game Othello. There are only 49 possible discrete spaces in the game, but the player pieces animate as they split and move to those spaces, giving the impression of a continuous space. However, with the clearly turn-based nature and board game-like structure of the game, it should easily be classified as using a discrete spatial model.

Q*bert

Q*bert (Gottlieb, 1982)

Q*bert is an action/puzzle game in which the titular hero must jump on all the cubes of a pyramid in order to change their colors. Game characters smoothly jump from cube to cube, giving an impression of continuous space. However, each object may only be located on one discrete cube top at a time, there is not really any space between the spaces. At the start of the gif image above, a red ball appears to drop onto Q*bert's head, which should kill him instantly. By the time the ball reached that space, the player had already initiated a move down and to the left. Even though Q*bert and the red ball appear to cross through the same area, they are not both located at the same discrete space at the same time.

Note also the short pause when each character hops from one space to another. This makes the time in the game feel staggered and two characters move almost as if they are in a real time version of a turn-based game. Each "step" of movement is broken up into a discrete segment of time.

Q*bert appears to use a discrete spatial model and the movement model only accentuates this sense of discreteness.

Pac-Man

Pac-Man (Namco, 1980)

A fast-paced action game like Pac-Man seems like a prototypical example of continuous space with characters smoothly chasing each other around the maze.

The discrete tile grid behind Pac-Man's collision detection, from "Pac-Man Dossier" (Jamey Pittman, 2009)

While sprite visuals may appear in many positions on the screen, each game object's collision is tracked on a discrete grid of 8 x 8 pixel tiles, as illustrated above. Two game objects collide when they are on the same tile at the same time.

Blinky moves 6 pixels to the right, but he remains in the same collision tile,  from "Pac-Man Dossier" (Jamey Pittman, 2009) 

Note that the game sprites are much larger than each collision tile. The character is considered to move from one tiles to another when its center point overlaps the next tile in the grid. This simple system reduces the computational load of detecting collisions between many moving objects and works perfectly... almost all of the time.

Illustration of the "pass-thru bug," from "Pac-Man Dossier" (Jamey Pittman, 2009)

On rare occasions, two game characters moving in opposite directions may pass through each other without colliding if both characters move into different tile grids at the same time, essentially swapping positions on the same frame. Pac-Man players sometimes have the experience of dodging past an enemy ghost monster in this way, miraculously saved from certain doom.

Conclusion

Does Pac-Man convey a discrete or continuous spatial model? The game conveys a sense of a fluid continuum, not only of space but also time. Contrast this with Q*bert's individual cube tops and staggered time intervals that convey a sense of discreteness. If Pac-Man should be considered to be be discrete, then almost every game should also be discrete. How many possible positions are required to consider a space to be "continuous?" 

Freeway (RCA, 1977)

Consider the RCA Studio II game console with its 64 x 32 screen resolution. Even with limited possible positions in visual space, many games on the system are designed around a continuous spatial model (as illustrated by Freeway, above). Contrast this with Civilization V, a discrete-space strategy game with game maps that are up to 128 x 80 tiles in size. Civilization V has a higher density of possible spatial positions, but would not be treated as a continuous spatial model. So, it is not just the number of spatial positions that creates a continuous spatial model.

Some games, like Q*bert and Pac-Man require a judgement call as they convey elements of both continuous and discrete spatial models. Time and space and game mechanics can be taken into account to determine the type of model used.