One of my favorite arcade games in the early 80s was Atari’s Pole Position (released in 1982). This was a rather simple racing game, perhaps not much different than Night Driver from many years earlier, except that it had much better graphics.
In the arcade, Pole Position was often a sit-down game with a steering wheel, accelerator pedal and brake, although there was also a stand-up version of the game. As a young kid it really felt like driving!
Pole Position was also rather difficult as I recall. The premise of the game is that you are racing against other cars and the clock. You have to finish the qualifying race in a top position in order to begin the real racing.
In the real race, you had to finish each lap before the timer expired or else your car would just run out of energy and sputter to the side of the raceway. Touching another car while racing would cause your car to explode, as would veering off the road into a billboard, something I would do with great regularity.
As was the thing to do back then, every popular arcade game got a home conversion and Pole Position was no different. There were conversions to the Atari 2600, Atari 7800 and the Atari 5200 / 8-bit computers. Each worked and sounded a bit different, especially from the arcade original.
The Atari 2600 version looks insanely chunky today, but it actually wasn’t that bad for the time. It has lots of colors and fair driving dynamics. Of course, driving with a joystick was always a poor compromise and made things very touchy. It was easy to turn too much and crash.
The other cars did look like trash, though.
Pole Position on the Atari 5200 and Atari 8-bits were both essentially the same game — after all they were basically the same hardware underneath. The graphics here were much improved. The standard Atari character set was used to display the score and other statistics and the cars were much more detailed.
Pole Position for the Atari 7800 looked even better. Even though the 7800 did not have dramatically better resolution than the 8-bit computers, it did have more colors and more sprites.
Technically this was a port of Pole Position II, the upgraded version of the game with extra tracks that debuted in arcades in 1983. Pole Position II was also the pack-in game that shipped with every Atari 7800. It made use of the two-button controller by using one button for the brake and the other for the accelerator.
One nice feature in this version is the blimp at the beginning with the banner, although on the 7800 it says “Prepare to Race” instead of “Prepare to Qualify”.
There was no official version of Pole Position for the Atari ST, but I’ll have more to say about that in Part 2.
There were five times as many uprights as there were cockpits https://forums.arcade-museum.com/threads/pre-1984-atari-production-numbers.56305/