Eight 1970s arcade titles that changed the game

It’s a little hard to imagine because, even though they still dot our cities, neglected ten-pin bowling joints and shopping malls, arcades just aren’t as much of a thing anymore.

Today it’s all about mashing out some Need for Speed in the comfort of home – progress to be celebrated, but old-school arcade games sure were charming. Gaming of some kind or another has been around a long time, but it really took off in the 1970s, the decade that kicked off the ‘golden age’ of arcade games with Space Invaders, in 1978. It was a time that included some influential and unique car games, too – here are our top eight.

The year 1974 saw the release of the first modern car arcade game and, incidentally, it was the first to include a steering wheel. As well as the wheel, Atari’s Gran Trak 10 featured a manual gear shifter, an accelerator and a brake pedal for the player. The technology pre-dated vector graphics, so the car was basically six dots on the screen that were mashed together to form a car-like shape. This ‘car’ would make its way around a 2D circuit, its edges outlined by – you guessed it – a line of blobular dots. The more laps completed, the higher the score. Gran Trak 10 is the grandaddy of car-based racing games.

The first of the Speed Race series (there were two more versions in 1976 and 1977) burst onto the scene in 1974. While it featured basically the same controls as Gran Trak 10, the game play was different: it was the first use of ‘scrolling’ in a video game. Instead of a static bird’s-eye view, the player’s car raced vertically up the screen on a scrolling track, dodging – if the player had skill – everything in its path. Speed Race was a big hit in Australia, so much so that it’s a great place for collectors to find an original machine.

What’s better than one steering wheel? Two: one for you and another for your mate. Destruction Derby was a re-creation of the wild goings-on born in the USA in 1947 and duplicated in small towns and suburbs across the Western world, including suburban Australia. Destruction Derby simulated its namesake: the insane competition that involves intentionally smashing your car into another’s to test your metal, mettle and level of insanity. Death Race followed Destruction Derby in 1976, a modernised version of the same game but still featuring those basic blob graphics.

If Speed Race blew everyone’s minds with its scrolling screen, Night Driver in 1976 changed car arcade gaming forever by bringing a first-person perspective to gameplay. For the first time ever, you could look ahead – almost out the windscreen – as you hurtled along a highway ahead of you, obstacles and opponents flying by, left behind in your imaginary smoke and rubber. Games still use this perspective today – so it doesn’t get much more influential than that.

Fonz, 1976: Feel the rush. Ay!

Okay, this is a motorcycle game but its influence is profound. Its genius is in a thing that today’s gamers take as standard, maybe even take for granted: controllers that wiggled and jiggled in liaison with the on-screen happenings. Today we can feel every bump, drift, skid and jump as if we are at the wheel, but in 1976, for the first time ever, Fonz – an ode to Fonzie from Happy Days, ayyyy – featured handlebars with haptic feedback. Every stack, skid and collision would rattle the bars in a player’s hands.

The first game to have multi-directional scrolling was a game that made the world’s biggest selling car its hero: Super Bug and a souped-up, fat-tyred Volkswagen Beetle. While Bugs weren’t ordinarily known for their spine-tingling performance – Herbie ‘The Love Bug’ might argue – the Bug in this game was a rocket. Wait, what is multi-directional scrolling, anyway? While Speed Race featured vertical scrolling, Super Bug’s track would twist and turn left and right while doing the same. It was one of the funnest games of the ’70s; kids dumped piles of pocket change into Super Bug with the kind of financial abandon only kids have.

The Driver sits in a genre of games that’s part cinema experience, part electro-mechanical game. It’s a game in which the player had, funnily enough, little control; in a way, the game played you. It was a film-based game where the player’s mechanical inputs – accelerator, brake and steering wheel – needed to match the happenings on screen: in this case, moving 8mm footage of high-speed racing through the countryside. Failure to match the high-speed scenes on screen would end in your demise. The Driver was the most successful game of Kasco, a small Japanese video game manufacturer most prevalent in the ’70s.

Such a big moment: the first ever first-person car racing game to feature vector graphics and… it’s a moving monochrome line drawing? Speed Freak of 1979 seems like a total bummer until you start nerding out on just how smooth the scrolling is and realise that this sketch-drawing set the scene for the future of car racing games.

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