1977 – Indy 500

When the Atari VCS launched in 1977, there were two racing games that went out alongside it. Indy 500 is almost without question the better of the two, and features some of the best racing action on the platform in its lengthy life.

The overhead perspective and game mechanics seen in Indy 500 were pioneered by Atari in its March 1974 single-player arcade game Gran Trak 10, the company’s first true racing game. Gran Trak 10 was inspired by a pen-and-paper game called Racetrack published in the January 1973 edition of Scientific American. Developer Steve Mayer felt like the calculations used in that game to determine the movement of cars along a track could be used in a video game.

Notably, Indy 500 is also the only commercially released VCS game to use the driving controllers, which were packed in with the game. The driving controllers use a rotary encoder, instead of a potentiometer like the paddle controllers. These offer full 360 degree rotation, and provide each player with 16 angles of precision on which way they want to turn their car. Riddle tried to get the game to work with the standard paddle controllers, but since the pots eventually will hit their edge in either direction, it just wouldn’t work. Riddle assigned the sole controller button as the accelerator, with the top speed available adjusted with the difficulty switches on the game console. Because it came packed in with the two driving controllers, Indy 500 sold for double the price of other VCS games at launch. Indy 500 sold for $39.95, a steep jump above the $19.95 all other VCS games were on the market for. But without the driving controllers to act as a steering wheel, Indy 500 doesn’t work very well. It’s actually kind of unfortunate, as the VCS played host to a number of racing games, and many of them could have been adapted effectively to the driving controller; on the other hand, in the years since Indy 500 came out, we’ve seen many times over that if a controller or accessory isn’t packed in with a game system from the get-go it’s much less likely to see a whole lot of support, simply because the potential sales base is going to be that much smaller. So in a sense, Indy 500 also pioneered the genre of “good games that require you to dig out specific controllers”.

Indy 500 still has managed to hold a following today. The website Atariage has two distinct hacks of the game featuring a variety of new tracks for fans to cruise around, Future racing games on the platform may have added power ups or shifted perspectives, but Indy 500, for all its little flaws, is one of the standouts of the VCS’s 1977 lineup.

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Watch this fantastic video by Atari Archive on their YouTube channel: