Hello, everyone! Guess who’s back! Did you all miss me?
… Eh, I’m used to it. I get the same response when I go home for the holidays.
With the Early Access release of The Endless Mission out in the wild, we’ve been hard at work getting ready for the first major content update we’re bringing to the game later this month: The Racer! To that end, your favorite video game historian, responsible for the award-winning (citation needed) series on the history of UGC, has returned to provide another blog series, this time focused on the history of racing games! When did they start? What kinds of racing games exist? Have any racing games taken advantage of UGC in the past? Well, get in, buckle up, and plug in the AUX cord so you can start blasting the soundtrack from your favorite Mario Kart course at full volume, ‘cuz we’re about to rev up and find out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMyFkraDzyY
Hot Take: This is the best Mario Kart song. Miss me with that Coconut Mall nonsense.
Space Race: The First Racing Game
This advertising flyer for the game is so 70s, my cargo pants turned into bellbottoms just looking at it.
So, just how much of a cornerstone are racing games to gaming as a whole? Try this fact on for size: Racing games are almost as old as the Video Game Industry itself. The very first racing game was Atari’s Space Race, released in 1973. This was only one year after their first release - and the first commercial video game, period - Pong. The gameplay was very simple: Two players raced to get from the bottom of the screen to the top first, all while avoiding asteroids along the way. Still, all the elements needed to constitute a racing game were there. Now, what with this being a brand new genre from the company that basically invented commercial video games, it was totally a smash hit, right?
Well… Er… No, actually. It bombed. It bombed hard.
Artist’s Rendition
As it turns out, people were still perfectly happy with just Pong. In addition to the original Pong, the market at the time was dominated by other companies just making Pong clones. No one felt the need to move onto the next big thing quite yet.
Still, even with things not going quite according to plan, Space Race’s impact on gaming cannot be denied - any and all racing games can trace their lineage back to this game. And for Atari’s part, they didn’t let this failure deter them from the genre at all: A year later, they would release Gran Trak 10, which was the first car racing game, along with being the first game to use a steering wheel controller.
The ad was still hilariously 70s, though. Don’t worry about that.
A Marathon of Firsts
With racing games having gotten their start so early in the history of video games, many early entries in the genre introduced new concepts that would become not just mainstays in racing games, but in video games as a whole. Let’s try to cover as many of those as we can, shall we?
In the same year that Atari put out Gran Trak 10 (1974), Taito put out Speed Race (not to be confused with Space Race). It was created by one Tomohiro Nishikado, the man who would go on to create one of the most famous arcade games of all time, Space Invaders. In fact, Nishikado has said in interviews that it’s this game, not Space Invaders, that he considers his favorite work! Like Gran Trak 10, Speed Race used a steering wheel controller, but it also brought its own firsts to the table: It was the first game ever to feature a scrolling background, and it was the first Japanese video game to get brought over to North America.
In 1975, Electra Games gave us Pace Car Pro, one of the very first video games with color graphics. It also allowed up to four players to compete at the same time, a step up from the two-player multiplayer that Space Race offered. 1976, meanwhile, brought in a lot of firsts. Taito was back at it again with Crashing Race, the first “racing” game that instead focused on vehicular combat rather than straight up racing. Sega gave us two racing games this year that broke ground: First was Road Race, which introduced a three-dimensional, third-person perspective to racing games, and second was Moto-Cross, a bike racing game that was the first game to have haptic feedback - the handlebar controls vibrated whenever you crashed. When it was brought to America it was rebranded as Fonz… Yes, as in Happy Days Fonz. Go figure.
Eeeeeeey…
1976 would also see the release of Atari’s Night Driver, the first racing game that used a first-person perspective. However, all of this would pale in comparison to one of the more… infamous legacies that was established that year, courtesy of Exidy’s Death Race. Death Race had gameplay much like Crashing Race, but instead of trying to slam into other cars, you were instead tasked with running down monsters to score points. Very humanoid looking monsters that let out a painful screech when hit and left behind a tombstone. This made Death Race the first video game to spark media controversy… Which, naturally, resulted in it becoming far more popular than it would’ve probably been otherwise. D’oh.
The first controversial video game, and certainly not the last.
Racing games entered the 80s in a big way with Namco’s Rally-X, the very first game to feature background music. It also had scrolling in multiple directions (although Atari’s Super Bug did that first in 1977) and an on-screen radar for keeping track of opponents. Meanwhile, 1982 would bring us “The Big One”: Pole Position. In addition to being the first racing game to feature a real-life track (Japan’s Fuji Speedway), this Namco classic was the highest-grossing arcade game in 1983 and would go on to be a massive influence on all racing games that would come after.
If Space Race invented racing games, this vibrantly colored classic defined it.
1984 was a BIG year for racing games (and dystopian novels, but that’s neither here nor there). This year saw the release of Plazmaline by Technosoft, a space racing game that’s considered the first game to use 3D polygon graphics, as well as Nintendo’s Excitebike, the first racing game with a track editor (yes, we’ll be getting back to this one and how it ties into UGC as a whole in a later article, don’t you worry). Additionally, up until this point, most racing games were not particularly realistic due to system limitations at the time. However, this would change with the release of Geoff Crammond’s REVS, the first racing simulation game that focused on providing a racing experience similar to real life. This would be the beginning of racing games branching off and settling into specific sub-genres, something that we’ll get into more next time.
And Now, For The Most Obvious Entry In This Article
It’s-a me! The game you were all thinking of when you first started reading this!
By the mid-80s, most of the major conventions of the racing genre had been established, with new games simply using better technology to improve on the concepts that came before. However, in 1992, those crazy folks over at Nintendo would completely revolutionize racing games with the release of Super Mario Kart. Until this point, most racing games were either “arcade” racing that focused on fun, or “simulation” racing that focused on realism. Furthermore, very few, if any, racing games put much thought into the people actually doing the racing - it was just you the player and a bunch of generic racing dudes.
Well, Super Mario Kart would say “Phooey!” to all that. In this game, you could play as one of eight different Mario characters, each with their own unique playstyle and personality on full display. While arcade racers already put being fun over being realistic, Super Mario Kart rejected any semblance of realism and instead fully embraced an overtly cartoony style of racing, with hopping, drifting, and dodging all sorts of obstacles across many fantastical tracks. It also introduced a heavy amount of randomness and emergent gameplay unseen in racing games previously. Before in racing games, victory would almost always go to whoever was the most skilled at the game. Now, with the help of randomized power-ups, anyone could pull off an underdog victory and come out on top.
I swear to Miyamoto, if you even so much as LOOK at me with that Red Shell…
Super Mario Kart would go on to achieve massive critical and commercial success, becoming the 4th best selling Super Nintendo Entertainment System game and appearing on countless “Greatest Games of All Time” lists. Mario Kart would quickly become a flagship series for Nintendo, seeing a major release on virtually every Nintendo system that has come since. Even beyond that, however, Super Mario Kart would kickstart one of the biggest subgenres of racing games - The Kart Racer - with many, many other companies jumping on board making their own takes on the concept. Most would fade to obscurity, but a few would rise through the ranks and become equally memorable in their own right. Even so, the Mario Kart series remains one of the best examples of this kind of racing game thanks to its high-quality polish and charming personality.
And hilarious memes. Can’t forget those.
Conclusion
We’ve only made it to the early 90s in our overview of the racing genre, but with how much Super Mario Kart changed the game, this is as good a spot as any for an intermission. Now that all the groundwork and genre conventions have been laid, racing games from here on out become less about innovation and more about perfecting what’s already there. Come back next week for lap 2 of our series, where the sub-genres get solidified and major franchises start coming out in full force. See you then!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/827880/The_Endless_Mission/
Image Sources: GIPHY, Wikipedia, Fandom.com, Kotaku, Indietronews, mobygames, techcrunch, knowyourmeme