Grand Prix

The sensation of speed on hardware that had only a handful of pixels and a few colors to work with was, in the early days of home gaming, an almost magical feat. Grand Prix for the Atari 2600 delivers exactly that feeling, putting you behind the wheel of a racing car and pitting you against a rapidly approaching rival on a track seen from a bird's-eye view.

The gameplay is straightforward and addictive: you steer your car along a horizontally scrolling track, dodge slower vehicles, and try to complete the stretch in the best possible time. The game offered several tracks of varying difficulty and length, emphasizing quick reflexes and precise maneuvering through thickening traffic. The scrolling environment was smooth for its time and created a surprisingly brisk sense of racing.

Grand Prix was created by designer David Crane for Activision, a studio founded by former Atari employees dissatisfied with the anonymity their original company imposed on them. Crane later became famous as the author of the legendary Pitfall!, and his signature of distinctly polished, carefully tuned gameplay is evident in Grand Prix, too, which ranked among the technically advanced titles of its day.

The Atari 2600 was the platform that brought home gaming into millions of households, and racing games were an inseparable part of its lineup. Grand Prix showed that even on this modestly equipped machine you could evoke the authentic atmosphere of fast racing, which made it one of the favorite titles among the console's owners.

Today, Grand Prix is a reminder of Activision's golden era and of a time when game designers like David Crane became the industry's first stars. For collectors and retro lovers it represents a fine example of the early racing games that laid the foundations of a genre that would later grow to enormous proportions.

Why play: It's a brisk, catchy racing title from the creator of Pitfall!, David Crane, which proves just how much speed and fun could be squeezed out of the Atari 2600 hardware.