Spinning Disks to Super Scaler Evolution (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.

Part 4 of this series will look at early single-screen racing games and how they may have influenced the maze game genre.

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.

A "Cartoony" Spatial Paradigm? pt. 1 (Cutie Q)

Taxonomy of Virtual Spaces

Many of my previous posts have focused on the "Filmation" aesthetic style as an example of a spatial paradigm in digital games.

This post is an exploration toward evaluating another paradigm through the evolution of "cute" or "cartoony" games, with their genesis in the late 1970s and evolution through the 1980s.

Cutie Q

Cutie Q screen shot

Cutie Q (Namco, 1979) was the third title in Toru Iwatani's Gee Bee series, preceded by Gee Bee (1978) and Bomb Bee (1979). The Gee Bee games were inspired by Breakout (Atari, 1976) which had kick-started arcade game popularity in Japan in a way that Pong (Atari, 1972) and its clones never had. The Gee Bee series mixed block-breaking gameplay with pinball and pachinko aesthetics, featuring interactive items on the playfield like pop bumpers, spinners, and rollover targets. Cutie Q is the first to feature cute characters in the game, such as pink ghost "minimon," yellow "walkmen," happy/unhappy faces, and characters on the rainbow-colored blocks.

Earlier arcade games had featured recognizable characters that were more than simple paddle, car, tank, or rocket ship shapes (such as TV Basketball (MIdway, 1974), Western Gun/Gun Fight (Taito/Midway, 1975), and Circus (Exidy, 1977)). Tomohiro Nishikado's Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) aliens are recognizble as different sea creatures (octopus, crab, and squid). However, none of these earlier characters would be considered to be "cartoony" or "cute" (although the crab space invader is generally considered to be "the cute one").

Cutie Q is probably the earliest example of a "character game"* with intentionally cartoony and cute (it's right there in the name) figures. This concept served as direct influence on Iwatani's next game with Namco, Pac-Man.

Cutie Q Visuo-Spatial Analysis: The game screen emulates an orthographic view of a bagatelle-style playfield, but there is no real sense of gravity to understand which way is "down." The player could be looking down at a plan view of the playfield (like a pinball machine) or across at an elevation view (like a vertically-mounted pachinko machine). The character images are shown in orthographic front and side elevation views, the best way to show character details on a tiny 16 x 16 one-bit-per-pixel (1BPP, i.e. a two-color palette) sprite. The game has a sense of continuous 2-D game space limited to a single screen (fixed frame).

* The term "character game" is also a term used for Japanese "simulation games" (what we call board-and-counter wargames in the west) that are based on manga and anime series. For more on this topic, you should see my other blog for articles and translations I've made of various Japanese sci-fi and anime games (and one German one).

[addendum 6 August 2026]

Head-On

Head-On (SEGA/Gremlin, 1979)

The American SEGA subsidiary studio Gremlin created Head-On (1979), an arcade hit in the relatively untapped genre of maze games. The game Gremlin designer Lane Hauck said the idea for the game "just came to him," not citing any other game as a particular inspiration.

The player controls their car with a four-direction joystick rather than the typical steering wheel and gas pedal used in many driving games of the era. There is no finish line to race to. Instead, the player must drive over and clear all the "lane markers" (dots) in the road maze before an erratic, computer-controlled enemy car can smash into you. The cars are locked into 4-way orthogonal movement along the road lanes but can briefly move diagonally to change lanes at intersections. This is more limited than the precision steering and 32-way movement of a game like Gran Trak (Atari, 1974), but simplifies the game and allows for split-second gameplay. The player doesn't have to worry about scraping against a road barrier while they concentrate on avoiding the enemy car out to crash "head on" into them.

Head-On plays differently from the few earlier maze game examples. In Gotcha (Atari, 1973), players use 4-way movement to chase each other in a shifting maze with wide passages (diagonal movement seems to be restricted to the "attract mode" between games). The Amazing Maze Game (Midway, 1976) locks the player into narrow orthogonal "lanes" like Head-On, but the goal is to go from start to finish faster than a computer-controlled character can solve the maze from finish to start. The two characters do not interact if they collide with each other. Head-On may be the first of the "dot eater" genre, where the goal is to explore the entire environment, rather than to reach a singular goal (tag the other player in Gotcha, reach the finish line in The Amazing Maze Game).

Sales flyer for Nintendo's licensed Head-On N (1979)

Gremlin was purchased by SEGA Enterprises (an American company at the time... the story of SEGA is a long and complicated one) shortly before Head-On debuted, so SEGA also published the game overseas through its Japanese subsidiary. SEGA was only able to meet the demand in Japanese arcades by licencing the game out to other manufacturers like IREM (as PT Head On), Nintendo (as Head-On N (see above)), and Nichibutsu (as Rolling Crash).

Head-On served as a template for early home games like Dodge 'Em (Atari, 1980) for Atari VCS, Tunnels of Fahad (Adventure International, 1980) for TRS-80 computers, and Car Wars (Texas Instruments, 1981) for TI-99 computers. Some of the more creative derivations in the arcades include Side Trak (Exidy, 1979), Space Chaser (Taito, 1979), Targ (Exidy, 1980), Spectar (Exidy, 1980), and Fast Lane (Konami, 1987).

Battle Course 4 from Super Mario Kart (Nintendo, 1992)

Evidence of Head On's influence on the racing game genre can be found in the Battle Course 4 map from Super Mario Kart (above), which was also included as a "retro course" in Mario Kart Wii (2008).

Head On Visuo-Spatial Analysis: The game uses a plan orthographic view of a roadway maze and the cars driving in it. It uses a continuous spatial model of a 2-D game space restricted to a single screen (fixed frame).

[end addendum 6 August 2026]

Pac-Man

Pac-Man screen shot

Iwatani's next game, Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) abandoned ball-and-paddle gameplay and seems like an evolution of the Head On formula: drive over all the dots in a narrow-lane, orthogonal maze while avoiding collisions. Pac-Man-Man, of course, replaces the act of driving with eating as the titular character devours his way through each maze. Bonus point edibles include fruits like cherries, strawberries, and oranges, their graphics reminding the player of "fruit machine" (a.k.a. slot machine) reel images.

Pac-Man is pursued by four ghostly, large-eyed monsters that look like they evolved from Cutie Q's pink minimons. Pac-Man features a technical leap past Cutie Q's graphics capabilities: the multicolored monsters and bonus items feature two-bit-per-pixel (2BPP, 4 colors, including transparency) sprites. Iwatani designed his monsters to be "cute," with big expressive eyes that look ahead in the direction they are moving.

The game also included some of the first "cutscenes" seen in a digital game.

Pac-Man first intermission

Pac-Man includes three intermissions that play after mazes 2, 5, and 9. These are short and humorous "cartoons" that reward the player with short breaks between rounds. This is further evidence of bringing visuals from animation into digital games.

Pac-Man Visuo-Spatial Analysis: The game screen emulates an orthographic plan view of a maze (not unlike a hedge maze) seen from overhead. It could be argued that the maze is seen from the side, but the lack of gravity that pulls to the bottom of the screen (this is not a platformer) and similarity to overhead driving games like Head On support a view from above. The character images are shown in orthographic front and side elevation views, much like in Cutie Q. This creates an incongruity between characters and their environment, one that I wrote about before (see the Orthographic Projection section). The game has a sense of continuous 2-D game space limited to a single screen (fixed frame) with a cylindrical topology (characters may move directly from one edge of the maze to the other by using the side tunnels).

To be continued...