I like racing games. Not so much the complicated ones where it’s a requirement that you tune every bit of your car between races, and where hitting a tree at over 300 kms/hr actually slows you down. I’m talking about the Outrun variety, where physics are given far less priority than speed and adrenalin. My enthusiasm for playing Indy 500 on the Atari 2600 took a beating after my experience with Street Racer a few months back left me feeling less than satisfied. I understood that I wasn’t going to get much of an adrenaline kick for a few years yet, but Street Racer actually made racing cars completely boring when it should be anything but. Could Indy 500 change my perception of racing games on early consoles? Let’s find out. Indy 500 is, as the name suggests, a game themed around the Indianapolis 500 race that’s held annually in Speedway, Indiana. The game itself though is really based on an early Atari arcade game called Indy 800. The arcade could host eight players simultaneously, with each of them controlling their car with a steering wheel and two pedals. The cabinet also had mirrors built into the top to allow onlookers to see what was happening on the flat-top screen below. It was popular, so it was no surprise when it was raised as one of the launch games for the Atari 2600.
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Indy 800 Flyer
Image Credit: The Arcade Flyer Arcade
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An Indy 800 Arcade Machine: It looks like a lot of fun, but I don’t imagine it would be particularly comfortable to play.
Image Credit: UK Video Arcade Collectors
Indy 500 was programmed by a guy named Ed Riddle, and it seems to be the only game he ever made. What’s really fascinating about Ed Riddle is that he wasn’t a programmer at all. He was a hardware designer, and had spent quite a bit of time demonstrating the viability of 3D video games (using the red and blue filter glasses that stuck around throughout the eighties and nineties). He didn’t have a clue how to write a computer program, but decided to attempt making a game for the new 2600 as a learning experience. He wrote Indy 500 on a teletype that was connected to a timeshare system, and embarrassingly screwed up, causing his program to compile in a loop for an entire night. This cost Atari $50,000, which I imagine was quite a substantial amount of money in 1977. The biggest challenge Ed faced though, was that it quickly became apparent that neither the joystick nor the paddle controllers that came with the Atari 2600 were going to work with his game. He was going to have to design something new, which makes it just as well that he was a hardware designer first and foremost. The result was the Atari driving controller.
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The original Indy 500 box: How the hell do drivers dodge that giant head on the track?
Image Credit: Atari Age
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An Indy 500 ad from back in the day: What exactly is the driver doing with his left hand?!?
Image Credit: Atari Age
When I was preparing for RetroSmack, I wanted to make sure that I at the very least had all the equipment I needed to play the nine original Atari 2600 games. That meant I would need the original joysticks and paddle controllers that came with the console, but it also meant that I needed to get my hands on a couple of driving controllers. Indy 500 is the only 2600 game that came with and required the driving controllers, so it possibly wasn’t very good value for me to track them down. I found some pretty cheap on eBay though, and once again they work perfectly with my 2600-daptor II. The driving controllers look pretty much identical to the paddle controllers, but the main difference is that they spin indefinitely in either direction, as opposed to the paddles that only spin 180 degrees in either direction. This was required, since the player needs to continually spin in the one direction to go round an Indy track, and it also means that the driving controllers sense relative position rather than absolute position. The other big difference is that the driving controllers are singular, whereas the paddles come as a pair with a split chord. This meant I needed two controllers and two 2600-daptor II’s to play two-player variants of Indy 500. The things I do for RetroSmack!
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My two driving controllers connected to two 2600-daptor II’s. I used two standard USB cables to connect them to my laptop.
As with just about all of the Atari 2600 games released in 1977, the packaging stretches the truth when advertising how many games are held on the cartridge within. The Indy 500 box suggests there are fourteen games, when in fact there are only really four (Race Car, Crash n’ Score, Tag and Ice Race). Each of the four games can be played in either one or two player mode, and the other six variants are made up of different tracks to race on. Let’s take a quick look at each:
Games 1-4: Race Car
The first four games are variants of Race Car, which is the standard Indy 500 part of the cartridge. The aim is to direct your car around the track as fast as possible. Press the button on the controller to accelerate and twist the knob to the left or right to turn. Game 1 and 3 are two player variants on two different tracks, with the second of them raced at a higher speed. I managed to convince my wife to have a go at all the two player variants, as you’ll see if you view the video at the bottom of the post. She’s not at all a gamer, so it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out which car belongs to each of us. We’d had a couple of wines prior too, so there were lots of crashes, laughter and swearing throughout. In both games, the player to make 25 laps first wins. Games 2 and 4 are single player variants on the same tracks. The aim of them is to get as many laps in as possible before the 60 second timer reaches 0. After playing Street Racer, I’m pretty glad Ed didn’t try to include a computer opponent. The A.I. just wouldn’t have been up to it.
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Race Car (Game 1): This is the easier of the two tracks
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Race Car (Game 3): This is the harder of the two tracks, requiring some good reflexes not to crash on the corners at speed.
Games 5-8: Crash n’ Score
The idea of Crash n’ Score is to crash more times than your opponent. Not into just anything mind you. There’s a white square that repositions itself around the screen each time its hit, with a successful hit giving the player a point. Just as with Race Car, Games 5 and 7 are two player variants on two different courses, whereas Games 6 and 8 are time trialled single player variants. There’s a little bit more strategy involved in Crash n’ Score, since if you drive off the top of the screen, you reappear down the bottom (and vice versa). Picking the right times to do this can give you a big advantage in reaching the white square before your opponent.
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Crash n’ Score (Game 5): Get the big blue dot before your opponent does. Then do it again when it reappears elsewhere.
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Crash n’ Score (Game 7): Leaving the top of the screen and reappearing from the bottom is a tactic that must be utilised to shorten the distance to the dot.
Games 9-10: Tag
Did you ever play tag at school? You know, where someone is “it”, and has to touch someone else to make them “it” instead? Well, this Tag is just like that. One car is blinking, while the other is solid. Counter-intuitively, the one that isn’t blinking is “it”. Out of all the games, this is the one where my gaming experience gave me a massive advantage over my wife. I probably could have driven rings around her and occasionally passed through the gaps in the boundaries to change things up and she never would have caught me. I purposely made bad decisions to give her a chance, but I can imagine how intense this variant would be with two equally matched opponents. There are two different tracks to play on, and on both the first player to reach 99 points wins the game.
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Tag (Game 9): The longer you’re not “it”, the more points you get.
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Tag (Game 10): The tracks are the same as they are for Crash n’ Score
Games 11-14: Ice Race
Ice Race is pretty much the same as Car Race, with one major difference. The cars slide a long way when going round corners, as if they were driving on ice. It’s almost impossible to go around a corner cleanly without letting the accelerator out at some point, even if it is only for a split second. I imagine this would have been quite a challenge to program for Ed, but it works reasonably well. As you would expect, there are one and two player variants with two different tracks to race on.
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Ice Race (Game 11): There’s some sort of primal enjoyment taken from sliding around corners in virtual cars…
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Ice Race (Game 13): …especially when the tracks are tight, and precision is required.
It’s ironic that Indy 500 is close to the best of all the Atari 2600 games I’ve played so far (along with Combat), given that it was its creator’s first attempt at programming in his life. The game mechanic is still used today, albeit with better visuals, sound, physics and artificial intelligence. Who knows, I may even hold onto these driving controllers for a while. My wife may just ask for a rematch next date night! Check out my video below to see some husband and wife action. You know you want to!
I figured something a little more intense would work for Indy 500, so I took a track from Judas Priest’s 1977 album Sin After Sin. Enjoy!
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The Indy 500 (1977) RetroCard has now been added to the RetroCard Shop. It’s a common card, so therefore costs 10 smacks and has a limited release of 120.
Featured Image Credit: Atari Age
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