Pole Position
Pole Position in 1983 was one of the most closely watched ports of all - bringing Atari's famous arcade racing cabinet to a modest home console demanded a considerable dose of ingenuity. The player first completes a qualifying lap, whose result determines their position on the starting grid, and then simply races down a track lined with billboards and rival cars that must be avoided, while the remaining time counts down. Anyone who arrives at the track too late, or crashes too many times, risks having the race ended early, which forced players to drive carefully despite the pressure of the ticking clock.
Controls are reduced to shifting between two gears, the throttle, and steering the car sideways, yet the game still managed to convey a real sense of speed and racing tension. Gradually driving through a landscape with increasingly sharp turns and rising difficulty keeps the player tense from the first seconds of a lap to its very end. The graphics engine, with its pseudo-three-dimensional perspective of the road receding into the distance, was a major technical challenge on the Atari 2600, and the resulting version had to noticeably scale back detail, color, and smoothness of motion compared to the arcade original, yet it still managed to preserve the key game principles and the recognizable atmosphere of the racetrack, including the simple engine sound and beeping upon collision.
At the time of release it was one of the console's best-selling titles, and for many players it represented their first encounter with the style of game that had made arcades famous around the world at the time. Pole Position helped establish the racing game genre with a cockpit view, and its influence is visible in a number of later titles that adopted both the qualifying lap and the principle of avoiding slower cars. Today the controls feel stiff and the graphics very sparse, but as a historical artifact documenting the effort to bring the arcade experience home, it still deserves respect and remains an interesting point of comparison with the original arcade version.
Why play it: For fans of arcade racing, Pole Position is an important historical milestone that established the cockpit-view racing genre, even though the controls feel stiff today.
Game 55 of 69 for Atari 2600
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.
