Past meets present: TX-1

Namco’s Pole Position, released to arcades in 1982, was a massive hit. The kind that shifts the entire direction of the industry and what it spends its time creating. It was effectively the first racing sim out there, and literally changed the game by emphasizing passing other cars and where you finished instead of just staying on the road: you were racing against a clock, you were racing against other cars, and you were racing against yourself. That you could do all of this from a faux-3D perspective in 1982 only made it that much more appealing and a standout for arcade crowds — such was its staying power and technological achievements that Pole Position managed to win a Coin-Op Game of the Year Award in 1984, two years after release.

Pole Position didn’t have to be the final word on what a racing sim looked like, however. Namco gets much of the credit for that, with Sega soaking up most of the rest: the two went back-and-forth in the 80s and 90s on these points, in a literal arms race that ended with the former partnering directly with Sony and the Playstation to get more of leg up in the living room, while Sega joined forces with military contractor GE Aerospace to have access to more advanced 3D technology for its arcade games, including its racers.

Before Namco had taken that next leap after Pole Position with 1987’s Final Lap, though, before Sega and Yu Suzuki had introduced OutRun to the world, there was a much smaller arcade developer with its own big ideas. That was Tatsumi, an outfit so small that it still doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page 43 years later, despite the fact that it still exists in some form in the present. Tatsumi developed a game that hewed even closer to realistic racing than Pole Position had, but one that most people in North America probably didn’t even know existed until recently, unless they happened upon it by chance in arcade over the last 40-plus years. That game is TX-1, which received its first-ever home console port in 2026, via Hamster’s Arcade Archives series.

What was with the delay? The same issue that kept TX-1 out of the majority of American arcades: its size. TX-1 was played on a huge sitdown cabinet in order to accommodate its many innovations. There was a dedicated three-screen setup, four years before Taito brought Darius to arcades with a similar arrangement, which meant that the cabinet width was significantly larger than that of the single-screen Pole Position — and that size meant a higher cost, too, not just for arcade operators but also players. The number floating around the internet says that Atari, the North American distributor, was charging arcade operators $5,499 for TX-1, which after inflation is around $18,000 in the present, and in turn players paid a premium for a ride in the same way expensive laserdisc games were more expensive to play than their peers.

While TX-1 was successful in Japan — to the point where Sega and Yu Suzuki began to develop a series of very expensive, very immersive, very large cabinets of their on with Hang-On, Space Harrier, OutRun, and more just a couple years later — Atari had little luck making it a mainstay in North American arcades. In Japan, though, TX-1 was the top-grossing upright cabinet in Japan in December of 1983 according to Game Machine, and remained at the top of that leaderboard until the mid-May 1984 check-in, where it fell to second behind Data East’s Thunderstorm. TX-1 was then third in the first June ranking, moved back up to second in July, and stayed there until September, when it slipped back to third. When its sequel TX-1 V8, hit Japanese arcades, that took over as the top game and stayed there for most of the next year — the original TX-1 was a top-five game that first month, then second behind its sequel in the next, staying there until December of ‘84 when Pole Position’s own sequel popped into the charts, pushing it into a tie for third. It took until Jan. 15 of 1985 for TX-1 to slip out of the top five in the Game Machine rankings, and when it did it was still sixth. Then it was back in the top five the next two rankings, and back to second behind TX-1 V8 after that — this game had serious staying power in Japan, and stuck in the top 10 of the Game Machine rankings until Jan. 1986, and wouldn’t fall out of the rankings entirely until the mid-March update. TX-1 V8 was still kicking at that point, though, and TX-1 actually ended up back in the top 15 on multiple occasions following its dip: it would make its final appearance in the upright Game Machine rankings on Oct. 15, 1987 — four full years after its release in arcades.

Part of the sustained success was that it remained a game that could only be experienced in the arcade. To bring it back a couple of paragraphs, TX-1 was never ported until 2026, because the three-screen setup created an experience that could not be replicated on television or computer monitors of the day, in the way Pole Position’s single-screen experience could. Read reviews of the early Darius home ports in comparison to the arcade versions, and they will, by and large, allude to the fact that this game didn’t feel like anything special. And a large part of that is because what made it special was in the presentation, in the arcade experience — without the massive, panoramic view, it was just another horizontal shooter, albeit one with a killer Zuntata soundtrack. TX-1 would have felt a little too much like Pole Position instead of a leap forward, were it converted to, say, Atari systems or the Famicom. You wouldn’t have the three-screen experience, as well as two other major innovations: audio that was designed to replicate what driving inside of one of these cars would sound like, and force feedback through the steering wheel.

The three-screen setup was for more than just being able to catch the eye from across the floor of the arcade. It was actively utilized in gameplay, with upcoming turns — and hints as to how long the turn you were currently on — displayed in these side screens, which were meant to be giving you a full view of the road ahead, which didn’t have to abide by the standard setup of the time of having everything look flat and same-y. Look at how it was utilized in some stages of TX-1, for instance, creating angled roads and visible elevations on the sides of the road.

Tatsumi also utilized the additional monitors to create more detailed environments that you were driving through, and to better differentiate one from the next.

You can see the full breadth of a mountain range off in the distance there, not just a couple of scattered peaks to let you see that there is more beyond the road, and because of the three-screen setup you can catch the full view of it all like you would if you were actually driving in a car, instead of the tighter view of Pole Position which is similarly set behind the car in a “chase” cam but has a much narrower focus. It makes the world you’re racing in feel that much more real, that much more three-dimensional, or at least less like a track with nothing else around it — and since TX-1 takes you all over the world, from mountains to cities to desert and more, that kind of differentiation is important.

The audio also helped with this sense of place. It is loud, ever-present, thanks to the placement of speakers in the cabinet: all around the player in the seat, in order to create something of a surround, “3D” sound. This is enjoyable throughout, with the cabinet’s high volume helping to make you feel that you were actually in this car despite the lack of a first-person view, but never more noticeable than when driving through a tunnel. Here, the sound shifts to better resemble what going through an actual tunnel would be like, with the hum of the engine bouncing off the nearby walls instead of these soundwaves radiating out, unimpeded, into the beyond of open space. It doesn’t come through in the home port as well as it does within the cabinet itself, but it’s still a noticeable change — and the kind of attention to detail that, in 1983, is astounding in the quest for a more realistic racing sim.

Throw in that force feedback made you feel your crashes in your own hands as well as the vibration of the steering wheel as you drive this vehicle 400 kilometers per hour through various environments, and Tatsumi absolutely nailed the next evolution of the racing sim, in the calendar year after Namco blew away the scene with the introduction of Pole Position. It’s a ridiculously impressive piece of work, one that Japanese arcades and players recognized while it was comparatively passed over in North America, despite Atari attempting to market it as a sequel to Pole Position — Atari had distributed that game overseas, as well, so while the connection was false it was still one that could be played up for marketing purposes by Atari. It helped, too, that Namco distributed TX-1 back in Japan, and it’s not like anyone knew who Tatsumi was, so it would have passed the smell test if only anyone had bothered to sniff.

There is another innovation in TX-1 worth mentioning, and it isn’t hardware-based like the rest. After finishing a stage, the player gets to choose between two options for what’s next: you can’t experience all of TX-1 in a single run, but instead make a series of choices about which path to take, which influences which final stage you will end up driving in. It’s the same kind of setup that Sega’s OutRun would utilize and in 1986 when that first launched, and, to go back to Darius, also similar to what it utilized… in addition to that game’s panoramic, three-screen display. Taito owes Tatsumi a not-insignificant debt for multiple modes of inspiration there, despite the wildly different genres at play. Maybe not coincidentally, Taito was in charge of distributing TX-1 elsewhere in Asia, so it was certainly familiar with all of these elements for reasons beyond its developers seeing and playing the game in an arcade.

The handling in TX-1 was also a step up, in the simulation space. This all sounds like old hat now, over four decades later, but you will not get to the end stage of TX-1 without mastering when to brake and when to downshift — if you hit a turn going too fast, or attempt to blow through streets that need to be carefully navigated lest your car go off the road, you will crash or go off the road; there is no question about that. You need to know when it’s safe to pass and when attempting to do will cause a collision, which is very important in this game because your car, styled in an open-cockpit, open-wheel design like F-1 or IndyCar, will be obliterated if it crashes into anything. You might get away with lightly grazing another car, if was just a little kiss of the tires, but most of the time you’re going to go up in flames and feel that force feedback in action.

You can’t just slam on the pedal and go, but have to instead develop a real feel for racing. It’s a wonder in some ways that TX-1 ever took off in Japan, given how different it felt in this regard from even Pole Position, and how quickly you could crash enough times to fail to get out of even the first stage. However, it is such a visual and audio wonder to experience inside the cabinet, that it’s also not difficult to see how, once exposed to it, anyone playing would go “no, hold on, let me try one more time,” despite the cost. It’s the kind of game that makes you want to be better at it, so you can see what else it has to offer. That it felt like that to play in 1983 is clear even now in the present, when myriad racers inspired by its innovations — or racers inspired by the ones inspired by it — are out there in significant numbers.

Scoring works similarly to both Pole Position and OutRun, where you get points simply for staying on the track and for longer, but like with the former you also get bonus points at the end of a stage for passing cars. So, you’re not just racing the clock — which you are very much racing against, in order to earn time extends to allow you to get through the next stage — but also other cars on the road, and they don’t want you to pass. They also don’t want to explode in a fireball, though, so if you’re patient and go about this right you’ll find the openings to weave in between them, if only you’re brave enough to go through with it.

The early challenge involves mastering some wide turns to stay on the track and go about things in a time-efficient manner, so that there is more on the clock in the next stage. Regardless of which stage you pick next, the side of the road is going to be busier, as will the road itself: driving through a city — which you reach by taking the Left route — involves narrower streets, more congestion, and lower speeds than the open roads of your initial run, for example, and there are far more obstacles to avoid crashing into on the side of the road in the Right route choice: you can’t afford to veer off the road here like you could maybe get away with in the initial level, since you’re much more likely to crash into something when you do. Either way, you’ll learn in a hurry that the brake and downshifting matter, because you simply can’t fly through every level at over 400 km/h without consequence.

It all feels fast and dangerous, even 43 years later. It’s all touchy, yes, but less so to modern hands than Pole Position — it feels better with the original steering wheel, but you can do a solid enough approximation of its precision with a D-Pad in 2026; don’t even attempt to use an analog stick if you want to feel like you actually have control.

If nothing else, TX-1 is a game that should be experienced so that you understand a missing link in the history of racing sims: for Japanese developers and players, there was nothing missing, not for such a hugely successful game that dominated in arcades for four years, even as its sequel similarly took off. But overseas, with the game failing to win a spot in the arcades in North America, there’s a significant gap in between Pole Position(s) and OutRun, between those games and Final Lap. One that should have been filled with TX-1.

Thanks to Cosmo for compiling a database of Game Machine rankings.

This column is “Past meets present,” the aim of which is to look back at game franchises and games that are in the news and topical again thanks to a sequel, a remaster, a re-release, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

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