Yo VIP! Let’s Kick It!

Three Thousand?

Digital Days

Purely Physical

So glad it wasn’t a fridge!

Console Concepts

Shiny.

Still looks good today!

Sweet Sixteen Bits

Is it Super NES or SNES?

 

 “Now You’re Playing With Power. Super Power.”

Always a sucker for a digitised image.

Is this the hardest game ever?

Mode Swings

Effortlessly SFC

Ultra Man? For the cover? Surely not!

Bottom Of The Ninth

The Japanese boxes were always cooler.

 

Purple Bricks

Clean Up In Aisle Nine

Not Under The Influence

Road Rage?

Jump Started

Bulked Up

Plastic Surgery

“Greetings, Starfighter…”

Zero Sum Game

The post “F-Zero” Nintendo (1990) -History of Arcade Racing – Part 19 appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

“Winning Run” – Was Namco’s polygonal showcase a coin-op winner?

Namco’s wonderful “Winning Run” made it into UK arcades in early 1989. And 1989 was shaping up to be a banner year in my life.  On the radio in England that summer we had  “Ride On Time” by Black Box, Madonna’s “Like A Prayer” and “Back To Life” by Soul II Soul. The big movies of the year were Tim Burton’s “Batman” starring Michael Keaton and the third “Indiana Jones” movie. John Candy starred as “Uncle Buck” and James Cameron released his epic underwater action movie “The Abyss.”

Money For Nothing

There was no one even playing it either. It was sitting there in the middle aisle of a very busy arcade, untouched and unloved. And it was a whopping 50p per play so that ruled out most casual passing players as well.

For 50 pence it would really have to be amazing to justify such a frivolous investment!

Forever 21?

This game was running on incredible new state of the art hardware. It was known as Namco System 21, and known internally as ‘the polygonizer.’ It used 3D shaded polygons to draw the graphics. Now, I was no stranger to polygons back then – I’d seen them drawn on my friends 16-bit home computers at framerates of ONE or TWO frames per second. And we all knew that these truly were ‘the future of graphics’ – but I’d never seen them move so quickly as “Winning Run” was drawing them in realtime. This machine looked like something you’d see on television on  BBC One on a Thursday night. This was real “Tomorrow’s World” type stuff. This was 60,000 polygons a second  – and in case you haven’t looked it up yet, this was a Namco F1 ‘simulation’ game. Nowadays, we have to use the word simulation very loosely, but back then the rule pretty much was ‘if it has a steering wheel on it, then yes, it’s a fully accurate simulation of driving.”

No Logo

Tomorrow’s Technology. Today.

The post “Winning Run” Namco (1988) History of Arcade Racing – Part 18 appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

Splash Waves

It’s fair to say that Sega’s “OutRun” was more influential to developers than Namco’s “Pole Position” was. It had licensed cars. There were  hills. You had choice of routes and you could pick the music that played in-game before you started. And wonderful though it was, it never had a proper sequel. Yu Suzuki had already moved on, to do other things. To push the 3D envelope further. He followed up arcade racing game “OutRun” with “Super Hang On” in 1986.  In other words, that game was simply “OutRun on motorbike.”  The whole world would be turned upside down with his next game, the phenomenal “Afterburner” in 1987.

Go Baby Go Baby Go Baby Go

If you thought driving in an open top Ferrari in rolling hills looked impressive, then your jaw was really going to drop when you saw “Afterburner.”  That game showed a fighter jet flying through the fastest 3D landscape the world had ever seen. (It’s the game you see John Connor playing in “The Galleria” in the 1991 movie  “Terminator 2 Judgment Day“) Sega were really onto something with their “Super Scaler” technology. “Afterburner” was made using a new piece of Sega hardware called “The X Board.” I was always eagerly awaiting a follow-up to “OutRun” and it wasn’t exactly easy to find out about what was happening in the arcade world at the time. But then one day, a friend told me they had played ‘a new Sega arcade racing game” in a local pub and that “it had an amazing feeling of driving” and “looked better than Afterburner.” Was this the “OutRun” sequel I was hankering after?

Under The Influence

I was too young to be able to legally drink in pubs in 1988, but a few of my friends had suddenly become very interesting in sneaking into them. With the sniff of a new AM2 game in the vicinity, all of a sudden so was I. One Friday evening a group of us ventured off to said local hostelry in search of a good time. One of my friends was the first to pass the driving test, and his parents had kindly lent him use of their family car for the night. My friends were dreaming of wine, women and song. Me, well I was just going to play the arcade racing game. The pub was rammed, really rammed. But I found not one but two coin-ops located on the far right hand side of the bar. One of the cabinets was a Nintendo “Play Choice 10” machine – which was a huge arcade sized NES with ten carts inside and you could play until the time ran out. For someone like me, it was a nice way to take a look at other NES games I’d not seen, but the timer felt a bit cheap to me. You’d just get to the first swimming level on “Super Mario Bros.” and bang! the time ran out. Plus, why would I pay 50p to play on hardware I had back at home, when I could be trying out a new Yu-Suzuki game!

Seriously Attractive

That game was “Power Drift.” It was running on an entirely new Sega hardware board – the “Y Board” and it was the first kart racing game I’d ever seen. It was also the first game I’d ever seen showing an aerial fly-around of each stage during the attract mode. It had a choice of characters, the go-karts looked like souped up hot rods. Yep, so far so good. Not having too much money on me, I think I spent the first 45mins carefully watching the attract sequence. I wasn’t one to instantly waste my precious first credit and fluff the game because I wasn’t sure what was happening.

Emotional Rollercoaster

The game had wild stages, each one looked more like a rollercoaster in a theme park than a real kart track. It was fast, and almost too confusing to play for an arcade racing game. I think my abiding memory of playing it was experiencing the force feedback effects on the steering wheel. I’d never felt anything like it. Every knock and collision was recreated inside the cabinet. Again, this effect is completely normal in today’s gaming world but back then this was really unique. It was hard to get good at the game on the first few plays.  You really had to concentrate on learning the courses, and my progress wasn’t helped by my slightly intoxicated friends trying to follow along and point at the screen ‘what’s that?’ and ‘what’s that mean?’ every few seconds.

Bad For Your Health

At one point someone spilled a drink down the front of the cabinet. Shortly after that  someone else stubbed out a cigarette on the top of the screen! My skills didn’t improve when my left foot kept sticking to the floor.  I had to wave away cigarette smoke with my left hand to keep a clear view of the screen! Looking back, it hasn’t aged well and has never been held in the highest regard by fans. But it was influential to a few developers. The very next year, Microprose released arcade racing game “Stunt Car Racer” by veteran Acornsoft programmer Geoff Crammond (he of “Revs” fame – see earlier posts!) and that game, although different, was most definitely inspired by “Power Drift.“

So why else is this game important? Well, I think it was the first time I ever heard the term “drift.”  Therefore, this was a term that would come to dominate my later working life…

The post “Power Drift” SEGA (1988) History of Arcade Racing – Part 17 appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

Rad Racer is a little known arcade racing game that released in 1988 for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

School’s Out!

Magical. Mysterious.

First In Line

Japan Has A Word For The Ultimate Video Game….

Back then Nintendo just weren’t well known in Europe at all. The NES got quite a muted launch, most shops didn’t sell them or stock the games. Mattel were the distributors for the UK for the launch years. Although I bought the machine, the gun and the robot (!) I didn’t know anyone else who did. And I didn’t meet anyone else who had for quite a few years. It was really hard to find games to buy if you were a NES owner. There were occasional stories about the games in the fledgling “Mean Machines” section of Computer and Video Games, and Newsfield’s “The Games Machine” did a big piece at launch – but magazine coverage seemed to feature very  few screenshots and mostly wrote about games they saw at the Las Vegas CES show – (and 95% of those were never released over here in Europe). I’d never even heard of “Rad Racer” until the day I got to play it.

Boxing Clever

In 1988 there were two places I could go to buy NES cartridges – my local branch of Boots The Chemist and the newly arrived Toys R Us. Neither of these had systems on display so there was no way you could see a game running. All you could do was look at the box and make a risky guess based on the usually fake single screenshot of the rear of the box. Hence those magazine words were really important to me. I’d been able to try “Super Mario Brothers” and”Kung Fu” at the PCW Show held the year before at London’s Olympia – but other than that I was flying blind with each and every NES cartridge I purchased. The only sort of arcade racing game they had on show was “Excitebike” and that was more of 2D side scrolling game.

When Saturday Comes

At that time I had a regular Saturday job in a nearby town. The job was helping out in a new menswear shop. It was pretty boring and the shop seemed to have been built on either an ancient burial ground or somewhere where all the ley lines converged beneath us because time seemed to go very very slowly in there. Hours felt like years.

Luckily the Assistant Manager was an affable Brummie guy called Paul Nicholls. He was quite strict and seemed far too into menswear retailing than was really necessary, but at the same time was  into films, pop culture and enjoyed the odd credit into an arcade racing game every now and then. With so much time on our hands every Saturday we were able to talk about all the latest coin-ops and the latest films. He taught me everything I needed to know about folding shirts, how to sell the benefits of a poor quality suit and a handful of sales techniques.

Tear Along The Dotted Line

He never sold me on anything, but a few weeks later he ended up mysteriously buying a NES and three games from the local Boots on his way home from work. As cartridges were so bloody expensive, I’d made sure he bought different games to me. I remember the run up to Christmas 1988 as I lent him the original “Mario Bros.” (still the best 2P game ever made!) and he lent me Square’s fabulous “Rad Racer.”

Rad Mobile – was “Rad Racer” the best arcade racer for NES?

A few things are important to note here. Firstly, the game was made by Square in Japan. Trust me, in 1988 you would have never have heard of them. “Rad Racer” was directed by Hironobu Sakuguchi – who went on to direct the “Final Fantasy” series of RPG games. So this was my first taste of Japanese software that wasn’t made by NCL (Nintendo Co. Limited) themselves. So they are famous for arcade racing games as well as RPG games. Secondly,  the game was in 3D. Yes, you read that right – the game was in 3D back in 1988.

How on earth was this possible?

The Master System?

Passing Breeze

So how was “Rad Racer?” – for the time it was pretty good. It was a passable version of “OutRun” complete with traffic, hills and a convincing sensation of speed. The 3D gimmick was pretty good as well and gave a good illusion of depth to the screen. If you turned off all the lights in your room, it was even better. It was a game I played for a solid month. As I’ve written before, when you only have a few games you end up seeing past all the problems and with a lot of practice, you can get really really good at it. I completed the game many times and again,it’s one of the few games where I can look back and say that I played it to death and to an almost superhuman level of performance. If you take a look at the game on YouTube, you’d have to be a NES die-hard to want to play it today, but back then this was the closest thing available to getting anything remotely like Sega’s incredible seaside coin-op arcade racing game inside your own house.

Whilst you’re here, if you haven’t already please consider signing up to our Dangerous Driving Club. 

Our game is faster than “Rad Racer” but sadly, doesn’t come with paper 3D glasses…

The post “Rad Racer” (1988) History of Arcade Racing Games -Part 16 appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

Blackpool Rocks

As I sit down to write about my memories of Namco’s 1987 sit-down coin-op game,I can quite clearly recall a sunny afternoon in Blackpool. It must have been early Summer in 1988. Before I start writing these pieces, I usually watch a few videos of each game on YouTube to take a look at each one. Some of these games I’ve not seeing running in over 25 years.

Mad As Hell

New And Shiny.

Photo-realistic Racing?

I Could Be So Good For You

Coin-Operated

Whilst you’re here, if you haven’t already please consider signing up to our Dangerous Driving Club.

The post “Final Lap” (1987) History of Arcade Racing Games – Part 15 appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

Is  SEGA’s “OutRun” is the best arcade racing game of all time?

I first encountered “OutRun” early in the Spring of 1987. Most of the UK gaming magazines had already printed screenshots of the game. They showed a level of graphic detail that was incredible. That was because all of the arcade racing games so far had never had white clouds in the sky. They didn’t have hills. They didn’t have choices of route either. Above all, they didn’t have cars that looked decent from the back.

Speed. Traffic. Crashing.

No picture in a magazine could ever really convey two things. One was the sense of the speed. This was a truly incredible sense of  speed.  Sega’s ‘super-scaler’ effect was a revelation. Everyone I knew really thought these were actual realistic visuals.  The second was the music. It was the first game that allowed you to choose the music that played whilst you drove. Just like turning a dial on a car radio. In addition, the tunes were catchy and seemed to fit perfectly with the beautiful ‘blue sky look’ of the game.

All About The Bass

All of Sega’s arcade racing cabinets had excellent loudspeakers and subwoofers. Therefore this specific audio hardware always helped you find the game. You could always hear the welcoming chime when you inserted a coin above almost anything else happening in the arcade.

Laws of Attraction

All arcade racing games featured what was called ‘the attract mode’ – this was the silent (but not always) visual loop that played when no-one was playing. Sega’s machine showed the iconic ‘orange sunset’ high score tables and the game logo. Playing this game always put a smile on my face. It was supremely fast, highly addictive, looked amazing and sounded incredible. To me, it perfectly encapsulated everything that a great arcade game should be. And I’ll let you into a secret…32 years later and I’m still playing it. And I’ve never genuinely finished it either.

Deeply Dippy

Finding an “OutRun” machine, either sit-down or upright cabinet whilst travelling around the world always felt like finding a friend somehow. On my 21st birthday, I was quite happily left alone with a bag of twenty five pound coins in the upstairs room of a local pub and an upright “OutRun” machine. My friends somehow didn’t quite share my enthusiasm for the fact that the machine offered four plays for a pound, or that I suspected, and later confirmed, that the DIP switches were set to a generous amount of allotted time. That was always a rarity on this game, and unscrupulous arcade owners almost always had the machine set to HARD.

All Is Lost

I’ve lost count of the number of arcade racing players who could NEVER make it to the first checkpoint. And I know there are many of you out there who came so close to passing said first checkpoint to run out of time either just before it, or more maddeningly stopping on the line itself, at zero time on the clock.

Photo Finish

Many many years later, whilst working at Electronic Arts, I was lucky enough to chat to some of the development team on “SSX Tricky.” They told me how they always made the AI back off away from the player right as you approached the Finish Line. The thinking behind that was that the player was about to experience ‘something amazing’ i.e. winning the race so why screw them over just because you can right at the very end. This approach was immortalised to me and the others in the room at the time as ‘always favour the player.’ Unless you ever got to play on Easy DIP settings, no “OutRun” machine ever did this. Instead it taunted you over and over and over again. Whilst I loved “SSX“, those guys told me they wished that they were making an arcade racing game too.

Trading Places

In 2005 at the E3 trade show in Los Angeles, I was privileged to meet the designer of the game, Sega’s Yu Suzuki. After an odd meeting with representative of both SEGA Europe and SEGA America, I was asked if I’d like to meet ‘someone special.’ So I was whisked into a small space at the back of the E3 exhibition space and introduced to the great man himself.

He was very well dressed and I think he was the only man in the convention centre to be smoking a cigarette. Who was going to mess with him? He was Yu-san after all. Unless you can speak the language, meeting Japanese strangers with a translator on hand is always a slightly awkward affair. My friend from SEGA Europe said something along the lines of ‘this is Alekkusu- he’s a crazy gaijin from England! He makes Burn-Outto!” There may have been a flicker of understanding from him at that point, but I doubt it.

Alex presenting Yu Suzuki with the Lifetime Achievement Award, Golden Joysticks 2019

If that wasn’t embarrassing enough I was then asked if he had anything to say to The Great Man Himself. I wasn’t too impressed with SEGA at that point in time. Quite frankly, who was? And I’m sure that included pretty much everybody working there at the time. I said “tell him that I think SEGA has lost its way, and lost it soul. Tell him I don’t understand why SEGA hasn’t got arcade racing games like Daytona USA, SCUD Race, OutRun and SEGA Rally all Online on Xbox LIVE?”

Chain Smoker

As this was hurriedly translated, the Great Man took a pause from smoking his cigarette down in three drags, looked over at me, and then spoke back to the translator. He carried on smoking. “Tell him I AGREE” came the response! I also told him that if he popped out to Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, then he would see that they had CD’s of the glorious “OutRun” soundtrack on sale front and centre right as you walked in the door. He said he would ‘go and take a look!” and that was that.

Whilst you’re here, if you haven’t already please consider signing up to our Dangerous Driving Club. – and remember kids, there’s nothing big or clever about smoking.

The post “OutRun” (1988) – History of Arcade Racing – Part 14 appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

The Greatest Year of All?

1986 was one of the greatest years of my life. There was just so much to like. At the Cinema there was “Top Gun“, “Aliens“, and “Crocodile Dundee“. In the charts we had “West End Girls” from Pet Shop Boys. There was “Sledgehammer” from Peter Gabriel. The Bangles hit Number One with “Walk Like An Egyptian.”

(We also had “Just Say No” from the cast of ‘Grange Hill’ and “Snooker Loopy” by Chas and Dave. Many of us have learned to block those memories out by now though.)

Bus Stop

There was a small arcade opposite the Bus Station in my hometown and it was in there before the Cinema one night in 1986 that I got to play “Buggy Boy” for the first time. It was made by Tatsumi, who’d also made “TX-1” and licensed it to Atari. You can read about how I feel about TX-1 here. It was also another three-screen cabinet game which really made it stand out. As you know, I’m partial to some nice key art to set me up for game, but I must confess that with this game, I just loved the name. It’s cool and it made me want to play the game!

Cute Character

Driving a dune buggy is also a cool concept for a videogame such as “Buggy Boy” and what this game lacked in real physical simulation it made up for in spades with its cute character and simple addictive driving gameplay. You had to race around a series of courses, avoiding obstacles like gates or logs and you could hit ramps and jump over streams along the way.

Tunnel Vision introduced by Atari

Those tunnels I first saw in “TX-1” were back as well.  “Buggy Boy” oozed style, playability and class. You could collect coloured Flags in order to earn a Bonus, there were occasional bits of banked course to drive up onto, you could pop the Buggy onto two wheels for a bit and bizarrely, you had to hit a Bonus Football with the car to every now and then to earn more Bonus Score. It’s touches like this that you just don’t see anymore with the much more sober games you find today.

I was spoilt for choice that night as next to the machine was a brand new “Back To The Future” pinball so both machines did their very best to drain me of all coins that I had on my person at the time.

Buggy Boy – Ported And Sorted?

The following year Midlands developer Elite Systems brought Buggy Boy to home computers. I’d looked forward to the conversion all year and picked it up on day of release. The guys at Zzap64! gave it a great review in their December issue and it certainly didn’t disappoint. Somehow the Tatsumi coin-op had been perfectly squeezed into the C64. Sure, it didn’t have the exact same visuals as the arcade version, nor did it have the bright summery colours found in the coin-op version, but the gameplay and sense of speed was fantastic. It was one of the last games I was to buy for my C64 and I’d already set eyes on a new piece of hardware, a grey console coming from a Japanese company called Nintendo. It was still a few months before the NES was to launch over here.

A Tramiel-Tastic Conversion from Elite Systems

In conclusion, I can’t finish this one off without mentioning the astonishing Atari ST version of “Buggy Boy “that Elite later released. My friend Matt got it for the 16-bit Atari ST and it was one of those dawning realisations that we were now going to be playing true arcade quality games at home. He was not being too happy that I was able to finish nearly all of the Stages except one on my very first play! (It was “East” that held me back if you must know!)

If you find it on MAME take a look, but it will never quite be the same unless you’re sat in that big cabinet with the steering wheel and three screens ahead of you!

The post “Buggy Boy” (1986) – History of Arcade Racing – Part 13 appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

Pitstop II was one of the early 8-bit racing greats.

Joystick Breakers

In 2018, it appears that we have lost a sub-genre or style of  game. One that all home gamers used to know well, but that now seems to have passed us all by. And that’s the genre known as ‘joystick breakers’ – those games that were guaranteed to push you to the physical limit. Beyond which only lay a broken controller in the heat of battle, and the satisfaction gained knowing that you had truly ‘given it your best’ up to that point.

During the mid 1980’s this genre was dominated by clones of Konami’s excellent ‘Track and Field’ arcade game. Whether it was Ocean’s Daley Thompson branded “Decathlon” title for ZX Spectrum owners or Activision’s stunning “Decathlon” for C64 owners – both were pretty much a given to lead to the purchase of a new joystick. This was how the guys are Kempston or Konix must have gotten rich.

But it wasn’t just athletics based games that could lead to a punishing joystick workout. It’s true, there was another. And Epyx’s stunning “Pitstop” sequel was just the game to do it. You can read my earlier piece on its prequel here. It’s safe to say that “Pitstop II” came out of nowhere. It felt like I was the only person in the world who knew of the first game. But this game came to dominate the summer of 1985 and exploded into the pages of the second issue of Newsfield’s excellent “Zzap!64” magazine with a whopping 89% review and a confident “Sizzler” status awarded.

Birthday Presents

I received the game as one of three games for my fifteenth birthday. It came the same day my subscription copy of Zzap! 64 arrived in the post. Then, I eagerly read the review whilst wolfing down my breakfast and loading the game up on cassette before going to School. After the long load, and being late for School me and my Mum barely had the chance to play for a minute before having to leave. In my excitement we even left the machine powered on and paused as I planned to run home at lunchtime and squeeze a quick game session in.

This was sort of the “Pole Position” game I’d been looking for. The graphics were amazing, the sense of speed incredible and best of all – it featured 2 player split screen play. I think 2P gaming is pretty much the epicentre of gaming really. Nothing feels better than the heat of competition between two players sitting right next to each other playing “Pitstop II”

Kempston Pro v Quickshot II?

Sure, it didn’t have a lot of tracks but playing the game led to a demanding workout on the joystick. You’d have to really push hard to the left or to the right to maintain that corner speed. Victories were hard fought and whilst single player was pretty great, the game was THE 2P game of that year. My mate Kempsey was a willing opponent and we spent pretty much the entire Summer of 1985 playing this game. The joysticks put the to the test were the Kempston Competition Pro and the older but reliable Quickshot II. I’d moved on from the Quickshot so tended to favour the Kempston. It was the first time I encountered the complex layout of Sebring in the USA. And I still hate that track with a passion to this day when encountering it in bouts of “Forza Motorsport 7.”

Have a look at the game in motion here:

It’s probably hard to understand today, but a game like “Pitstop II” really was a revelation. One of those few games were the sequel was way way better than the original. I’ve still got that joystick too!

Read Part 13 here:

“Buggy Boy” (1986) – History of Arcade Racing – Part 13

The post “Pitstop II” – History of Arcade Racing Games – Part 12 appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

“Le Mans” for the Commodore 64 is another little known, but brilliant arcade racing game.

Le Mans  – best top down Commodore racer?

If you’ve been reading these articles since the start, then you’ll know that I was a bit of a sucker for a good piece of box artwork back in the early days of home microcomputers. This game, another Commodore ROM cartridge title, this time for the Commodore 64 is another example.

Living In A Box. Living In A Cardboard Box.

That box artwork just looked really cool to me. In fact, it still does. It sets the scene and makes me excited to try the game. It shows a cool Le Mans racing car, at what looks like sunset leading a pack of other racers. And that car almost  has that cool Martini livery that made any race car look amazing back then. Who needs “Forza Motorsport 7” and it’s near photo-realistic 4K HDR visuals when the humble Commodore 64 offered all that and much more back in 1982! I wonder how many members of Forza development studio Turn 10 weren’t even born by that date!

Those were days my friend

I first saw this game at a microcomputer show in 1983. It was held on a very rainy weekend in my hometown of Stoke-on-Trent. The Show was being held at an old ballroom called The Kings Hall. Word soon got around at my School that it was happening. It had been well advertised ahead of time in our local newspaper.

I was one of the first people through the doors at 9AM prompt the following Saturday. It was a big hall full of computer retailers with small flimsy looking stalls all with one or two portable tellies set up on them. There were green felt tables stacked up with all of the game cassettes they were hoping to sell.

I went to a few microcomputer Shows back then. It was mostly a chance to check out the games on systems you didn’t own and to play something new. I think this was just before I actually got a Commodore 64 for myself so the machine felt powerful, mysterious and new to me. The ROM cartridges for the 64 came in tall but thin boxes, unlike their massive VIC-20 counterparts. Two games stood out to me. The first was Andrew Spencer’s incredible “International Soccer” (which I think was a lot of people’s ‘first time they saw a 64 game running experience) and the second was this one, LeMans.

Insert the Commodore 64 cartridge, HAL

Keen-eyed hardcore game fans among you will notice that the game wasn’t developed by Commodore. Like VIC “Road Race” before it, this one was made by a then unknown in the West Japanese development company called HAL Laboratory. Back then HAL only had five staff – and one of them was Satoru Iwata – who would later go on to run Nintendo Co. Ltd. in Japan.

The game was running on a small stand on the far left hand side of the Hall, a poor stand position pushed right up against the Stage which dominated the far end of the room. The stand was run by one guy. His stand had a Commodore 64, a telly and only a handful of games. There wasn’t much passing trade so he sat there reading a newspaper. He seemed more than happy for me to sit and play his games all day. So that’s what I did, for pretty much the entire day.

Playing a VIC cartridge game back then was quite exotic. A bit like driving a car with the top down. But playing a Commodore 64 cartridge game was really exotic at that time. I only knew one person who actually owned the machine, and he didn’t have any cartridges. This was almost outrageous behaviour. I could not for the life of me understand why there wasn’t a long line forming by this very stand, with gamers from all over Staffordshire lining up to try this incredible top down racing game on Commodore’s new wonder machine.

Take a look at the game running here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7at-bpfidhk

Anyone for Paddles?

It felt outrageous because this was a driving games that required paddles. I didn’t even know Commodore made Paddles, but they did and I was holding one in my hand, steering a car with one. Paddles were more of an Atari thing. A VCS thing, not a Commodore 64 thing. After all, we were almost sworn enemies back then. And a driving game that needed Paddles? This was lunacy, sheer arcade lunacy. And probably why no-one has heard of “Le Mans.”

Turbo Charged

I thought “Le Mans” was awesome. It had a night stage, where the headlights of you car illuminated other cars on the track. And then it had a snow and ice stage. All mind blowing ideas for a 1982 video game. It had a nice animation when you wrecked your car as well. It was quite a nod to Sega’s “SEGA Turbo” coin-op of the time but lacked the pseudo 3D effect. But to me it was brilliant and besides I’d never heard of or seen “SEGA Turbo” at the time anyway. The fact that it needed Paddles pretty much ensured that few people have ever heard of the game or played it.

I’ve never met anyone else who owned it. I do. I bought my copy of “Le Mans” off eBay in 2001. Towards the end of my time with the Commodore 64, I got hold of a cracked copy of the game. You could play with joystick or keys. If you really concentrated you could stick to the right hand side of the course – for some reason any 1982 videogame recreation of the French circuit had to be mostly straights – and only by making small movements you could pretty much stay in the game until your fingers lost all feeling in them. Which I actually did.

To Be This Good Takes Ages

“Le Mans”  always struck me as a very original computer game until two years later when I found myself in a mountain cafe on a ski slope in Northern Italy. In the corner was a Sega branded version of the game. I knew it then as “Dino Ferrari” but the internet tells me that was the name for the pirated version of the 1979 “Monaco GP” game – the forerunner to the incredible “Super Monaco GP” that would blow my mind many years later. Outside, the weather was freezing, but inside the cappucino flowed and so did all my Italian Lire.

Straight into the coin slot of that machine!

“Pitstop II” – History of Arcade Racing Games – Part 12

The post “Le Mans” (1982) History of Arcade Racing Games – Part 11 appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.

Some people can remember exactly where they were when significant world events happened. I’ve always had a good memory so major events are still really clear in my mind. but I can also seem to remember just exactly where I was when I saw certain arcade games for the first time also. Atari’s “TX-1” is a good example of this. I can clearly recall it was on a hot day in August 1985 and I was upstairs at “Mr.B’s Golden Mile” amusement arcade in Blackpool, England.

A Day At The Arcades

I used to spend about one day a year, two at most, back then visiting seaside arcades. It was THE day of the year for me to spend a whole day carrying a bag full of change around having a credit on whatever I wanted to play. You’d see the latest games, games you’d only have heard of third hand and wanted to try as well as finding older machines tucked away in dark corners.

“TX-1” is a bit of an oddity really. It was the first three – screen arcade machine I’d ever seen. That made it really stand out. And it had really good marquee artwork as well. (The marquee is the illuminated plastic bit that sits at the top of the cabinet and tells you what the game is.)

Here’s some emulated footage of the game in widescreen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCx5oHZqWVw 

Goal Oriented

You didn’t get to see computer games or arcade games on TV back then. But earlier that year there had been a computer based drama on BBC One on a Sunday night. The story revolved around corporate espionage of some sort. And briefly, very briefly, this three screen driving game featured in one of the scenes. And interestingly to me, it showed one of the “hacker” characters in the show finishing the game and reaching the mysterious “GOAL” screen at the end.

Arcade games on the telly was one thing. But seeing the actual endings of arcade games on the telly was another. To me that was like opening the back door at Area 51 and having a peek inside. Completely unexpected and very exciting. A mental note was thus made to track down said machine and try and reach said “GOAL” myself.

Here’s some more natural off-screen footage of the actual hardware running: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxovZC78nSg

Hidden Treasures

I was nearing the end of a long day in the seaside arcade. I’d eaten nothing more than a small bag of chips and drank nothing apart from a few cans of Coke. All I’d heard was bleeps and blops, and the sounds of fruit machine spitting out coins all day. As if one floor of amusement machines wasn’t enough, this particular one had two floors. So I was upstairs looking at an odd mix of coin pushing machines, and some older space shooting games. I was always on the lookout in hope of finding something off the beaten path – maybe a mint condition “Gravitar” tucked away or a legitimate “Phoenix” cabinet complete with original cabinet artwork?

Instead, there was a working “TX-1” machine. It’s not quite the Holy Grail of arcade games, but I’ve always felt it was hard to find. Three things stood out. Firstly, a three-screen driving game is amazing. Highly recommended if you happen to have three monitors knocking around. Secondly,  it was the first game I’d ever seen that had tunnels in it. They weren’t big or long, but there they were. Thirdly, the steering felt amazing. And that’s because the machine had force feedback steering.

The Force Isn’t Strong

Any aficionado of the scene will have a thing for decent force feedback. It can really add a lot to what can be an average game. “TX-1” is a good example, and Sega’s “Daytona USA” is probably another (!) Sadly though, force feedback and seaside arcades don’t mix well. I struggled to do well at the game as the steering on this machine was a bit wobbly and busted. My car kept pulling to one side. Therefore, I had discovered why this machine was hidden away upstairs at the back.

A few months later I saw an ad in “Personal Computer Games” magazine and it featured a 3D driving game for the Atari 800 from English Software. It was called “Elektra Glide” and looked to me a game heavily inspired by “TX-1” – probably the first home 3D game that had tunnels in it.

Here’s some footage of that game in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JxagpNL9Tw

Many years later I ended up working at the same company as the guy who coded it. His name was Adam Billyard and he was the Chief Technical guy at Criterion Software – the sister company of what would become Criterion Games.

“Le Mans” (1982) History of Arcade Racing Games – Part 11

The post “TX-1” (1983) – History of Arcade Racing – Part 10 appeared first on Three Fields Entertainment.