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.

As a refresher, Atari pioneered the genre with the arcade game Gran Trak 10 (1974). Its orthographic overhead view presents a race course that fits on one screen - no scrolling needed. The player feels like they are operating a remote controlled car from an elevated view, not seated at the controls of a racecar. 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).

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.

Speedway was Chicago Coin's licensed design of Indy 500 (1968) by Japanese amusement machine manufacturer Kansai Seiki (a.k.a. Kasco). Other similar designs released at that time include Grand Prix (SEGA, 1970) and The Racer (NAMCO, 1970) (more on The Racer in the next post).

Bushnell's vision of creating a video arcade version of Speedway took much longer than "a week," and it appears that Nürburgring 1 that served as Atari's ultimate 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).

The Scrolling 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). The scrolling direction was reversed for numerous downhill skiing games like Alpine Skiing! for Odyssey 2 (Magnavox, 1979), Skiing for Atari VCS (Activision, 1980), and US Ski Team Skiing for Intellivision (Mattel, 1980). 

Mad Alien (Data East, 1980)

Several "car combat" games add shooting to the Speed Race model. In the unusual Mad Alien (1980), the player pursues a roving (alien?) motorcycle gang and shoots them from a police cruiser in what plays like a remixed Galaxian (NAMCO, 1979). Bump 'n' Jump (Data East, 1982) and Gekisou (Alpha Denshi, 1985) let the player ram opponents off the road or jump over them. Spy Hunter (Bally Midway, 1983) and The Spy Who Loved Me (Domark Software, 1990) add both both weapons and speedboat transformations.

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.

Game Genres, pt. 2: Mattel Intellivsion's Networks (1979)

Continued from part one.

Another early attempt at categorizing digital games into specific genres was taken up by Mattel Electronics to organize their own line of game cartridge titles, which appears to have begun with the system's test market launch in late 1979. Note that this appears to predate Atari's own "contents" system of genres by at least one year.

Mattel Intellivision's "Networks"

Example of different game boxes for different "networks," Intellivision Catalog (1983)

Mattel's take on game genres is that each game belongs to a specific "network," capitalizing on the Intellivision being an "intelligent television." Each Intellivision game cartridge comes in a colorful box matching the color of its home network. This system of color-coded networks appears to have been designed from the earliest days of Intellivision: game cartridges were color-coded even during the early days of test marketing. The system evolved over time, with new networks like Space Action Network and Arcade Network added later.

• Major League Sports Network (high-quality sports games with unrivaled graphics set Intellivision games apart from their Atari VCS competitors. Mattel shows their love for licenses with NFL Football, PGA Gold, NHL Hockey, and other sports licenses.)
• Action Network (most arcade-style games are in this network. Note that Space Action is a spinoff from this network.)
• Gaming Network (casino-style games, many with a "Las Vegas" moniker at the start of their title. Note that Horse Racing falls under this network rather than Action Network.)
• Strategy Network (mostly games based on classic board games, with the addition of Don Daglow's Utopia, one of the first examples of a real-time strategy game. ABPA Backgammon uses a license from the somewhat obscure American Backgammon Players Association.)
• Children's Learning Network (only two games released were Electric Company Word Fun and Electric Company Math Fun in 1980. Interestingly, the TV show Electric Company had ceased production in 1977, but Mattel used the strength of licensing to lend an air of legitimacy to their software titles.)
• Space Action Network (this network is an offshoot of the Action Network. Two early games in this category, Space Battle and Space Armada, were first published in the red boxes of the Action Network.)
• Special Intellivoice Cartridges (games designed to use the Intellivoice voice synthesis hardware module released in 1982.)
• Arcade Network (only Vectron was added to this short-lived network. Later arcade game ports like Burgertime were released without a network classification)

Like Atari's system, Mattel's genre system is designed around marketing needs and informing a population of consumers. It serves as another data point of how early digital game manufacturers organized their own individual works as they saw best.

Game Genres, pt. 1: Atari's Catalog Contents (1981)

My research work is focused on the development of an "art history" of digital games, a diachronic view of game history as the creation and development of aesthetic styles, rather than simply a history of technological advancements. My work is often confused with the establishment of game genres (platformer, FPS, RTS, etc.), which isn't exactly correct. However, I realize that certain spatial paradigms are commonly shared by certain game genres and I thought it would be a good idea to look at how the concept of "genre" came to be applied to video games.

One early attempt at categorizing games into specific types comes straight from Atari, a dominant force in arcade video games and home console games throughout the 1970s and early 1980s.

Atari Catalog CO16725-Rev. D

Contents page from Atari Catalog CO16725-Rev. D (1981)

Atari produced several different full-color catalogs to showcase the "Video Game Program cartridges" available for their programmable Atari VCS (later renamed the Atari 2600) home console. Previous Atari consoles were dedicated to play only one game or a small selection of games that were stored in fixed ROM chips. The VCS was their first console where the game programs could be swapped out, allowing for a potentially unlimited number of games to be played.

Atari's first "Innovative Leisure" catalog features the eight different game cartridges that were available near the system's launch in 1977. By early 1981 when catalog CO16725-Rev. D was published, the VCS catalog had grown to 45 different cartridge titles (not including titles that had been dropped from production in the intervening years). For the first time, Atari needed to organize the expanding catalog into chapters, breaking up the titles into a number of game genres.

These genre categories remained consistent, almost unchanged through 1983's catalog CO21776-Rev. A. By 1983, Atari had also released the Atari 5200 system and the VCS was newly dubbed the 2600. 1984's catalog CO25618-Rev. A showed off the then-new (and ill-fated) Atari 7800 system, in addition to the 2600 and 5200, and the genre categories were given revised names. [The 1984 names are noted in brackets, below.]

• Skill Gallery [Skill & Action] (Breakout, Pac-Man, Circus Atari, Video Pinball)
• Space Station [Space] (Space Invaders, Missile Command, Asteroids)
• Classics Corner (casino and board games)
• Adventure Territory (Haunted House, Adventure, Superman)
• Race Track [More Adventures] (car driving games)
• Sports Arena [Sports and Atari RealSports] (sports games, including Video Olympics (a collection of Pong variations))
• Combat Zone [More Adventures] (Air-Sea Battle, Combat, Outlaw, Warlords)
• Learning Center [Kid's Library] (BASIC Programming, Codebreaker (includes Nim), A Game of Concentration, Hangman)

The implied purpose behind this system is one of informing consumers about a product line and as a marketing tool to show the wide variety of games available from Atari (important in the light of competitors like Activision cropping up to produce VCS cartridges that competed with Atari's own line). So, it may be less useful as a tool for research than a system intended to be a formal taxonomy of digital games would be. However, there are still some formal aspects that can be teased out of this organization.

Some of these game genres are similar to film genres (Space Station/science fiction, Combat Zone/war movie). These are categories focused on the aspects of representation rather than qualities of interaction (Thomas H. Apperley, "Genre and Game Studies: Toward a Critical Approach to Video Game Genres," Simulation & Gaming, Vol. 37 No. 1, March 2006 pg. 7) that describe the milieu (pg. 11) of a specific game. Presumably, from a marketing standpoint, fans of related forms of entertainment in other media (film, television, or literature) may be inclined to play digital games in a related genre (sports fans may tend to choose games from Sports Arena, for example).

Some categorization options are puzzling. Space Station game Missile Command is about defending cities against attack in a nuclear war, which thematically seems more appropriate for Combat Zone. Combat Zone game Warlords can mechanically be described as 4-player Breakout, but it is not included in Breakout's Skill Gallery category. Hangman and A Game of Concentration (the flipped-card matching game variously called pairs or memory) are "classic" game examples, seemingly fitting of Classics Corner, but are included in Learning Center. I suspect that Atari wanted to give the impression that the VCS had plenty of educational titles and padded out their Learning Center category with games that are playable by younger children.

Interestingly, all categories are named after a type of place (gallery, station, corner, territory, track, arena, zone, or center). This implies a location where games of a certain genre may be found and experienced. Flipping through an Atari catalog is almost an early, transmedial, analogue version of navigation through digital media. 10+ years later, this same sort of locational language would often be used to organize locations for different types of digital files on web sites (and even on BBS services before that). Together, they form the World of Atari.

The Adventure Territory games all happen to share a common mechanical quality. Adventure, Haunted House and Superman are games where the player's on-screen avatar explores a large, multi-screen environment. As the avatar reaches one edge of the screen, it reappears on the opposite edge with the screen framing the next section of the gamespace. 

Atari's genre system can be used as a contrast to the more analytical types of systems that I analyze in the following Game Genres blog posts.