Hard Drivin'

About Hard Drivin'

Hard Drivin' (1989) is Atari Games' arcade driving simulator, one of the first with 3D polygon environments, a force-feedback steering wheel and a stunt track with a loop and an open drawbridge.

Hard Drivin' in Depth

The player test-drives a sports car in first person, covering one or two laps of a track for the best time while avoiding traffic and obstacles. The closed course splits into two joined circuits, a "speed" track and a "stunt" track with a vertical loop and an open drawbridge, and ordinary traffic drives at normal speed, causing a crash on contact. A manual transmission mode adds a clutch pedal and the chance of stalling, and the steering wheel vibrates. Invisible waypoints track progress, shown as flags on the course map when time runs out, and passing the halfway point grants extra time. Players who score in the top ten in certain modes race the computer's Phantom Photon car.

After a crash, whether into another car or from a missed landing, a ten-second instant replay shows an aerial view of the lead-up, and the car is returned to the last waypoint, which may be a long way back. Leaving the road starts a ten-second countdown to return before the car is moved back. The engine, transmission, suspension and tyre physics were modelled with Doug Milliken, co-author of Race Car Vehicle Dynamics, who is credited as a test driver.

Making Hard Drivin'

Development began in 1988, and Atari had hoped to release it that year, but a vice president argued that nobody would buy a $10,000 arcade cabinet, recalling the cancelled Last Starfighter arcade game; weeks of research found the price acceptable. Doug Milliken's father William had led a team at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory in the 1950s that adapted aircraft equations of motion to cars. Atari sold 3,318 cabinets. Game Machine listed it as Japan's second most successful upright or cockpit cabinet in its 1 June 1989 issue and it was Japan's sixth highest-grossing dedicated arcade game of 1990. Commodore User called it "a major first" that "really does put you in the driving seat", Your Sinclair named it the best arcade game of 1989, and Computer and Video Games the fourth best. It was ported to the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, whose version reached number 2 in the UK, Mega Drive and Lynx, though an NES version was unreleased. Race Drivin' followed in arcades in 1990.