Night Driver

Night Driver ranks among the very first attempts to simulate night driving from a driver's point of view, and it was released for the Atari 2600 as early as 1978, in the console's early years. The player sits behind the wheel of a car moving down a dark road bordered only by a row of white posts on either side - no scenery, no billboards, just black darkness and streaking stripes marking the edge of the roadway, exactly as if the player were really driving a car without the glow of streetlights. It is precisely this reduction to an absolute minimum of visual elements that gave the game its unmistakable, almost claustrophobic atmosphere, something contemporary titles usually did not offer.

The goal is to complete the track as fast as possible without hitting the posts or oncoming cars, while the speed and tilt of the road constantly change, forcing the player to react almost instinctively to sudden turns. The game also offered a choice of difficulty, where a harder setting added faster pacing and less forgiving collisions with the surroundings. Technically it is a very simple but functional abstraction of three-dimensional space, achieved merely by shifting the posts sideways and changing their size according to speed and distance - a solution that was inventive and kind to the console's limited processing power for its time. The sound side is limited to a monotonous engine hum and sharp crash sounds, which only underscores the feeling of a solitary drive through darkness.

In the mid-seventies and early eighties, the concept of night racing without unnecessary graphical clutter was surprisingly functional, and the game earned its place among the early classics of the genre, helped also by difficulty variants and different track types. Night Driver feels extremely bare today and its pace is slow compared to later racing games, but as one of the first attempts at simulating driving from a driver's point of view it has undeniable historical value and shows how the genre was still finding itself in an era when the very concept of 3D graphics was just emerging.

Why play it: Anyone interested in the dawn of racing games will appreciate Night Driver as one of the first attempts to simulate driving from a driver's point of view, even with its bare pacing and graphics in mind.