Pole Position
The floodlights of the starting straight, the roar of engines and a voice urging you to get ready. Pole Position wasn't just a game, it was an event that defined how racing on a screen was supposed to look in the arcades of the 1980s. For an entire generation of players it was the first taste of what it felt like to sit in a real Formula car.
The gameplay laid down clear rules that later became the standard of the genre. First you have to post a fast enough lap in qualifying to even make it into the race. Only then do you chase your rivals and the clock, dodging slower cars and trying to hit the checkpoints before time runs out. A crash means a spectacular explosion and lost seconds, so every overtake is a bet on precision.
What makes Pole Position stand out is the combination of qualifying and the race itself, which gave the game structure and depth. The pseudo-three-dimensional view behind the car, the track streaming past with billboards and the sense of acceleration were among the most convincing things arcades offered at the time. The game also became famous for a track inspired by a real circuit, which lent it an air of authenticity.
The cultural impact was enormous. Pole Position became one of the most successful and influential racing cabinets of its era, and its qualify-and-race format was copied by dozens of later titles. It became the benchmark for what it even meant to play a racing game, and its name became so ingrained that it seeped into pop culture.
Today Pole Position is regarded as one of the founding stones of the modern racing genre. Without it, the long line of games built on the pure duel with the track, rivals and the stopwatch would hardly have come to be.
Why play: Because this is where arcade racing as we know it began, and the feeling behind the wheel of a Formula car is timeless.
Game 68 of 258 for Arcade
The same title elsewhere (4)
The Pole Position arcade cabinet ran on Atari's own custom graphics board and defined what cockpit-view racing should look like. The Atari 800 home computers and the Atari 5200 console shared a similar chip family with the arcade board (GTIA and POKEY), which makes their conversions among the more faithful ports of the era — capturing a similar sense of speed and engine sound, though with lower track resolution and simpler background graphics than in the arcades. Differences between the Atari 800 and 5200 versions are mostly cosmetic, since both draw on the same hardware family. For Pole Position at its best, go for the arcade cabinet; for a solid home experience, either Atari version delivers.
