XP Arcade: Pole Position

This column is “XP Arcade,” in which I’ll focus on a game from the arcades, or one that is clearly inspired by arcade titles, and so on. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Someone would have made a Pole Position eventually. A third-person, behind-the-”shoulder” racing game like that was an inevitability, in some ways, once the technology was in place to create it. Namco, though, made Pole Position before anyone else could, in 1982, and by practically brute-forcing the necessary technology into existence to do it. Someone would have made a Pole Position eventually, yes, but Namco got there before “eventually” could happen — Pole Position pulled off a chase-cam, faux 3D racer with large, scaling sprites and a sense of speed four years before Sega released OutRun in arcades, within the same nine-month period in which Namco also scored major hits with Galaga and Dig Dug. All-time classics, sure, but that a fixed shooter and single-screen maze game both seen as innovative and boundary-pushing released the same year as a faux 3D racing game with sprite scaling and changing scenery and sharp turns and other cars all over the road should blow your mind a little. At the same time that dynamic audio was just being figured out in video games, Namco made Pole Position.

Sega’s own arcade racer, Turbo, predated Pole Position by less than a year. It had a chase cam view, and you drove into the vanishing point off into the distance to give you a faux 3D feel, but it was also far more zoomed out in its view and with the same kind of small cars that existed in topdown racers, only with more a 2.5D graphical presentation and a road that didn’t shift overly much. As Sam Derboo got into at Hardcore Gaming 101, Turbo might not look like much today, but consider its 1981 contemporaries, and you’ll realize just how wild its technological achievements were. Turbo’s own importance in the development of racing games is sometimes dismissed in favor of Pole Position, but it’s worth pointing out that, while there are some similarities between the two, they’re also different games with different goals, as well. And Pole Position’s ended up resonating more in the end, and further shaping its genre because of it, in no small part because of how much of a leap it was over Turbo, which itself was a leap.

Pole Position was attempting to be the first racing sim — it was an arcade racer found in arcades, sure, but Namco’s decision to make it a Formula 1 racer that used a real-life track, the Fuji Speedway, and featured a qualifying lap to determine your starting place in the actual race all made it that much more realistic. Atari distributed the game in North America, and their marketing campaign was based around Pole Position’s realism. The 1982 release won Electronic Games’ Coin-Op Game of the Year award for 1984, because it remained just that popular and astounding all that time later. The only thing it was in competition with was its own sequel, which was more of a conversion kit expansion pack than anything — not to detract from Pole Position II, of course, but it was mostly “more Pole Position,” which was all Namco needed until a few years later, when they unveiled 1987’s successor, Final Lap.

That Electronic Games’ write-up gets to part of what made Pole Position remain in the public consciousness multiple years after release, at a time when new innovations constantly pushed the previous innovators aside. “For the first time in the amusement parlors, a first-person racing game gives a higher reward for passing cars and finishing among the leaders rather than for just keeping all four wheels on the road, thus making driving an art.” You were racing against a clock, you were racing against other cars, and you were racing against yourself. Again, that might not sound like much 43 years later, but a lot happened in those intervening 43 years, and a lot of what happened had to do with Pole Position.

Before Pole Position, Namco was known for their electromechanical racing games. These were early arcade titles such as a light gun game where you shoot a physical target, or a racing game where there is a screen, but not a CRT — what you’re looking at might be coming from a projector and using light tricks to simulate the experience of racing along a track or road. Namco — then Nakamura Manufacturing Company — would release Racer in 1970, which, like Sega’s highly successful Grand Prix from the year before, used a projector to make it appear as if the road was moving while you drove.

Namco would follow up Racer with a much larger, modified version of the game, known as Formula-X. Whereas Racer was an upright cabinet with a steering wheel and gas pedal, Formula-X had you sitting in a small car in an attempt to up the realism. Namco was serious enough about the realism factor that they used real, working tires on a fake, not-working car. Which, according to Formula-X cabinet designer Sho Osugi, meant that Namco employees once showed up to a site where an electromechanical machine was, and it turned out the four tires had been stolen. The thing is, the Formula-X cabinet was basically designed like a room, so someone who wanted to steal those tires could, per Osugi, just hide there until the coast was clear. As Osugi would note in a separate interview, Formula-X was so large that it was “basically only found at bowling alleys and the like.”

The follow-up to Formula-X was the 1976 electromechanical game, F-1, which was a mini version of its predecessor. “Mini” in the sense that you could fit it somewhere besides a bowling alley, anyway: this was still a deluxe cabinet with a car for players to sit in. Besides removing the tires that people would want to steal from the machine, it was also designed with different lightbulb placement than Racer had. As Osugi put it, “…in ‘Racer,’ the light bulb for the projection was a little high up, but in the sequel, ‘F-1,’ we custom-ordered a light bulb with the filament inside lowered. This lowers the viewpoint and creates a sense of impact.” As part of the same conversation, published by Bandai Namco themselves (and translated by Google) Shinichiro Okamoto, another designer on Namco titles ranging from electromechanical to home console releases, would add that, “Basically, it is projected onto the screen with a point light source, so when the light source is above or below, it feels like the viewpoint changes in CG in a video game.” And, as Osugi told Siliconera, courtesy that custom lightbulb, no one else trying to replicate the lighting effects of F-1 — “clones,” as he called them while laughing about it — was able to actually manage the feat, leaving F-1 at the top of its class.

F-1 succeeded both in Japan and overseas, where Atari handled distribution, and would be followed by F-1 Mach and its focus on more speed just a year later. F-1 and F-1 Mach would be the end of Namco’s electromechanical racing games — not from a lack of success, given that F-1 topped the charts in consecutive years until Taito unleashed Space Invaders on the world — but because their next racing game was a video game. Consider that, in order to simulate 3D visuals and the feel of racing for real, F-1 utilized a diorama with miniature cars and a track that rotated inside the machine, illuminated by light and a projector to give the illusion of driving — hence the electromechanical designation. Their first racing video game — Pole Position — simulated the feel of racing for real, too, but did it through a CRT monitor and programming tricks, instead of a diorama and light. It wasn’t the real thing, either, but it felt much more so, for a number of reasons, not least of all how dynamic it all felt in comparison to a more fixed experience provided by electromechanical machines.

Video game development cycles used to be a whole lot shorter than they are today, which is how Namco could do things like release Pole Position II about a year after the original Pole Position despite it being four times as large as the original. The shorter development cycles of the day were part of why Namco could do something as extraordinary as release Galaxian, Rally-X, Pac-Man, Galaga, Bosconian, Dig Dug, and Pole Position between September of 1979 and September of 1982 (the latest listed date for Pole Position’s Japanese release; most others are June), with another nine arcade games and a couple more electromechanical cabinets besides in the same stretch. Which makes the development of Pole Position even more striking: it was in development for three years, per the game’s own documentation.

Kazunori Sawano, one of the credited designers on Pole Position alongside electromechanical veterans Osugi and Okamoto, had “a single image of a game screen” drawn in pencil that he showed to the latter, which was his vision for an Formula 1 racing video game sim. And it was off to the literal races after that. Rather than attempting a topdown racer first, Namco went straight for Sawano’s vision of a (faux) 3D game, heavily based on what Namco was able to produce with the popular F-1 electromechanical series. Everything they were trying to do was new enough that it had to be done from scratch. There were concerns about whether it was even technically possible to produce the game Sawano envisioned, and Okamoto noted that, “there was no control formula or anything like that, and I suddenly read books on mechanical engineering. It started from things like, ‘What is a clutch?’”

In a short 1985 interview with BEEP! Magazine, Okamoto explained the goals the development team had when creating Pole Position:

The 16-bit processor was a Z8000, which had been introduced in 1979, and was designed so that a pair could operate together in tandem. Okamoto described the hardware elsewhere as “revolutionary” and stated that “Namco games were probably the only video games in the world that used such a CPU.” The “probably” there leaves things a little open, but still, it’s clear that this was some cutting-edge stuff Namco was doing if it’s even a possibility that they were the only ones using this thing at the moment they first started developing Pole Position. Which, again, was three years before it released.

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To actually play Pole Position is fairly simple, which is a credit to its designers, given that the foundation they were building on had been constructed from mechanical engineering books and electromechanical games rather than existing arcade games. You’re either in high gear or low gear. You can step on the gas to accelerate, and on the brake to slow down. That’s all there is to it. Drifting isn’t a thing here, given these are Formula 1 cars, but you will find yourself taking some tight turns where, if you don’t slow down either by letting off of the gas for just the right amount of time or applying the brake with the right pressure at the right moment, you will go flying off into another car, or off course, and possibly even into one of the billboards on the side of the road. Better that you temporarily dip from 180 miles per hour to just over 100, rather than waste time crashing, coming back, and starting at zero once more. Those turns, by the way, whether done well or poorly, were always credited in reviews for their realism and distinct, believable animation.

There is just the one track: the Fuji Speedway. It’s an actual track out there in the real world, as Okamoto mentioned in that BEEP! interview, which only helped with the embrace of the game and the marketing of its realism. Hey, a baseball video game that’s supposed to be in MLB but doesn’t have the Green Monster at Fenway is going to come off less convincing than one that does, so the same applies to a Formula 1 game. (Related, but eventually, the real-world names like Fuji Speedway and the real-world billboards in both Pole Position games had to be changed due to licensing issues — Pole Position is going to look a bit different to you depending on whether you play on an actual arcade machine, in a Namco Museum collection, or through Arcade Archives.)

While there’s one track, you race it in two different ways: first is the qualifying lap, which determines where you’ll start during the actual race. The better your placement in the qualifier, the more points you score as a bonus, as well, with a grand total of 4,000 points added to your score should you finish in the titular pole position — no small thing considering that the base high score for you to surpass is 10,000 points.

In the actual race, you’ll start based on your finish in the qualifier, and this time there are more cars on the road, and more laps. Depending on how the DIP switches of the machine are set, you need to complete either three or four laps to complete the race. Each completed lap will extend your time, and, whether you finish the race or not, you’ll earn a bonus of 50 points per car that you passed during your run. If you do complete the required number of laps and finish the race, you’ll also receive a time remaining bonus of 200 points per leftover second. This is where the real point separation on the leaderboard comes from, since the faster you finish, the higher your score. And if you’re finishing with a lot of time left, then you also passed a ton of other racers along the way.

And that’s it. That’s the entire game. The steering takes some getting used to, as you have to move the steering wheel (or press on the D-pad, depending on whether you’re playing on a cabinet or in your home) harder than you’d think, and yet, it’s also real touchy. It’s not impossible to master by any means, however: you just have to get a feel for the car and what it can do. And once you know just how much pressure to apply — to the wheel, to the gas, to the brake — then you’re going to start seeing your times improve. And maybe even finish a whole race.

Pole Position II would release the next year, with the Fuji Speedway once more included, and three other tracks, too. Besides these new tracks based on other real-world speedways, a new song, new billboards, and some new animations for exploding cars, they’re the same game. More Pole Position was what the people wanted, and it’s what the people got — one of the benefits of being ahead of the game like Pole Position was is that, like how DOOM just ended up with a bunch of sequels on the same engine while id worked on their newer, more impressive engine for Quake in the background, Namco could tweak and add to an existing game instead of rushing out to make the next big thing. There would be time for that, especially with Pole Position (and Pole Position II’s) dominance in arcades.

Pole Position was the top-grossing arcade game of 1982 in Japan. In 1983, it was the highest-grossing arcade game in both North America and Europe; it was raking in $9.5 million weekly — $31 million adjusted for inflation — in United States’ coins alone. It was also the top-grossing arcade game in the United States in 1984 per some sources, and remained top five in 1985. Its various home ports, to pre-Famicom and NES 8-bit systems and computers, were largely successful for Namco as well, both critically and commercially. Maybe most absurd, though, is that Pole Position remained that popular even with Pole Position II around. The sequel was a smash hit among conversion kits at the same time the original continued to dominate the charts, and was right up there with Pole Position in the United States in ‘84 — depending on the source, one or the other finished the year on top, with the other just trailing. Which, for our purposes, just tells us that both games were crushing it.

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The early start in the 3D realm with Pole Position is what led to Namco working with actual polygons before the end of the decade, with games like Galaxian3 and Winning Run, and had them so well-primed for the shift to 32-bits and true 3D before the launch of the Playstation, with titles like Ridge Racer on the System 22 arcade board. Ridge Racer released 14 months after Sega’s Virtua Racing showed off its impressive polygonal power, but it did so as the first arcade game with texture-mapped graphics, and at 60 frames per second (unlike the home console release on the Playstation or Virtua Racing, which both ran at 30). It’s probably not discussed nearly often enough just how influential and important the dueling pair of Namco and Sega were to the direction of video games owing to their work in the 80s in the arcades, but Sony owes a considerable debt to Namco for their full-throated support of their fledgling console that extended so far that the System 11 arcade board powering Tekken was based on Sony’s own hardware, a debt that includes international launch title Ridge Racer showing that Sony’s new machine could match the Sega Saturn and its own promise of arcade conversions of the likes of Daytona.

Speaking of Ridge Racer, there’s obviously a direct line from Pole Position to it, just in the sense that Namco had already been at this for a long time. Consider that HAL Laboratory was responsible for Nintendo’s F1 Race titles on the Famicom well before the latter’s acquisition of the studio, which means, in part, that Nintendo themselves didn’t really get going on faux 3D, vanishing point, chase-cam racers until the SNES with F-Zero and Super Mario Kart, and their foray into actual 3D racing in preparation for the era of the Nintendo 64 didn’t land until 1994 with the fun but clunky Stunt Race FX, well after Ridge Racer had already wowed via its arcade board and base console hardware. And that’s with Nintendo knowing their own hardware and its limitations and designing the stuff for their own purposes, too! Namco — and Sega — were simply so far ahead at this point, in a way that drove (pun intended, I guess) the rest of the industry forward.

In between Ridge Racer and Pole Position was the latter’s successor, Final Lap, with its eight-player races — the first such setup of its kind in arcades — and the first-person-perspective, 32-bit Formula 1 racer, Winning Run, which ran on Namco’s System 21 board and displayed 60,000 polygons per second in 1988, owing to it stacking four, rather than two, 16-bit processors together. Ridge Racer might have its own ideas about realism and physics, and it avoided the Formula 1 design, of course, but these games are still its predecessors. Namco doesn’t get to the point of blowing everyone away with Ridge Racer, as established and secure in their abilities as they were, to the point of impacting the console wars of the day, without everything that came before it. And it all began with Pole Position, over a decade earlier.

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