XP Arcade: Super Sprint

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.

Pong was obviously huge for Atari — that’s underselling it, by quite a bit — but that game was far from their only important contribution to the success of arcade games. In 1974, Atari released racing game Gran Trak 10, which was responsible for a couple of significant firsts in the industry. Namely, it was the first-ever arcade racing game to use cars — Space Race, also from Atari and released in 1973, used spaceships — while the Magnavox Odyssey racer, Wipeout, was a tabletop/console game that used light as representation for a vehicle. There had been racing games in arcades before, but they were electromechanical in nature, not full video games.

The second innovation is more of an “as far as we know” item rather than a definitive one, but Gran Trak 10 is believed to be the first game to utilize integrated circuit-based read-only memory — aka ROM — rather than diode-stored graphics. The “as far as we know” is because sources differ on this: Tank, an Atari-adjacent game, might have been the first game to do so, per the April 1995 edition of Next Generation magazine, which profiled Atari’s then-resurgence, but the books Racing The Beam and Atari Inc.: Business is Fun both cite Gran Trak as the source of this change in technology. Regardless, Gran Trak does have the first arcade racer with cars thing going for it, which is no small occasion. And even though it caused significant financial trouble for Atari by succeeding — someone did a poor job of accounting and each cabinet sold actually cost Atari money, and a three-month delay in production owing to having to redesign the cabinet caused a $500,000 shortfall — this did result in them merging with their subsidiary, Kee, which Atari had previously leaned on to make cloned versions of their games to work around whatever exclusivity deals arcade distributors cooked up. The aforementioned Tank was actually a Kee title, but released at the same time that the two were merging.

It was 1974, though, so Gran Trak wasn’t in color, and was fairly limited in some ways: the pedals were digital, not analog, so you couldn’t apply different amounts of pressure to change your speed, the steering doesn’t feel quite like racers would come to feel over time, as it was basically used just for actual turns, and there is just the one track to get through. Gran Trak 10 was also a single-player game, with Gran Trak 20, a later version, a two-player variant. This isn’t meant to downplay the important or enjoyment of Gran Trak, either, but to point out that Atari had plenty of space to improve and refine racing games. Which they did, by introducing Sprint 2 in 1976. This was developed by the Kee portion of Atari, and the “2” did not denote a sequel but how many players could join in at once. In 1977, Sprint 4 and Sprint 8 arrived, with Sprint 1 following in 1978. Whereas Sprint 2 was also a black-and-white game, 4 and 8 were full color, raster editions of the game.

Sprint 2 had a significant innovation contained within, which was to program “intelligence” into the cars so that they weren’t just following a predetermined path. Instead, cars adjusted to the tracks and their conditions, which included how the player or players were performing. Next Generation interviewed then-COO and president of Atari, Dan Van Elderen, in 1997 (issue 24), who brought this up as a significant project that he had worked on during his time in the company as an engineer, with the “semi-intelligent manner” that the cars drove in, specifically, as what made it so.

Which brings us to 1986 and Super Sprint. Atari had developed a multiplayer top-down car racer over a decade before that, and then technological advances allowed for a smarter computer opponent, as well as color graphics. Super Sprint, then, was the culmination of that changing tech with Atari’s foundational knowledge of the genre, and the result was wonderful. The steering and acceleration all worked much better than with Gran Trak, the graphics were a significant leap forward from Sprint, and the default four-player setup with up to three humans controlling Formula One vehicles meant you always had a winner, runners up, and a clear loser. If you’ve ever played anything multiplayer before, you know there was some real pressure among friend groups to not be that loser.

There are eight tracks of varying difficulties, and you would just play them on a loop until you had somehow cleared 85 of them. They weren’t just repeating directly, though, but instead the speed and quality of the computer opponents increased with each return visit to a track, and the number of obstacles to overcome — as well as their difficulty — increased as well. Those obstacles? Water puddles that slow you down, of course. Mud puddles that cause you to slow down and spin out. Oil slicks that spin your car a full 360 degrees. Cones, but not regular cones: exploding cones. There are tornadoes, too, which the manual describes as “like a moving oil slick,” which is against all odds an accurate take. Last are hydraulic poles, which raise and lower to impede your progress. You also have to deal with doors opening and shutting at random intervals, which opens and closes potential shortcuts depending on which it is, and oh, walls. Don’t crash into walls. Unless you want to explode by ramming into one at too high of a speed.

The concept of Super Sprint is fairly simple: you want to complete five laps before any of your opponents do. That’s the game at its most basic. Using the steering wheel, you’re going to take some big turns — bigger than you think you have to — in order to get around corners. You’re going to look pretty animated spinning that thing around to make your way around a track. And there are all kinds of turns to make, too: making them efficiently is the key to finishing in first as the difficulty arrives. Too many wide turns, and not hitting the “groove” of the track that lets you make it through the quickest, will result in the computer eventually trouncing you, never mind your pals who have discovered the proper way to get through.

There is more going on in Super Sprint than “just” that, however, and that’s not just a reference to the aforementioned obstacles. There are occasional shortcuts from track breakdowns — gaps in walls, spaces to drive over grass to skip a turn and plow forward, etc. — and they’re often difficult to access for one reason or another. The kind of thing that can actually make you fall further behind if you don’t hit the opening just right. There are also wrenches that randomly appear on the track, and you’re going to want to pick them up. The bonus points that appear are fine and all, but don’t go out of your way for them — the manual for the NES port even states that, “You get the highest scores by staying in the race.” Which is true, since there are post-level point payouts, as well as checkpoint bonuses you score again and again by simply getting through the course. If you can snag the bonus points, do so, but don’t risk slowing down or adding to your time to do it.

Wrenches, though. Wrenches are used for upgrades in between races, to achieve one of four goals: maxing out your car’s traction, its acceleration, its top speed, or, to simply add bonus points to your score. You only want to do the last of those things after you’ve already souped up your vehicle. You might do fine at first without upgrades, but remember: your opponents are going to get better at this as you revisit the tracks in a loop that isn’t endless but will start to feel as such. You are going to need higher top speeds and better acceleration, and remember the thing about the big turns? You need that traction upgrade, too, to help counter the significant understeering that, again, was very much for the show and feel of turning the wheel rather than anything resembling realism.

A later edition of Super Sprint would also be released for arcades, known as Championship Sprint. It’s practically the same game, just with new tracks and a two-player cabinet instead of Super Sprint’s larger three-player version. If you want to play either in the present, legally, well, you have to go back to the Midway Arcade Treasures collection, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, respectively, to do it. Not everyone has an Xbox, GameCube, or Playstation 2 still hooked up in their home, however, so that’s not exactly a simple solution. Oh, and steering with the analog stick isn’t recommended, either, if you’re trying to perfectly replicate the experience of a steering-wheel based game with intentional understeering. It’s touchy. But alas, that’s what those compilations had to work with.

There are successful home editions of Super Sprint. The Atari ST port is a beauty that does an excellent job of replicating the visuals of the arcade original. It’s not a 1:1 conversion by any means, but it manages to retain more than just the gameplay, and at least keeps the spirit of the visuals. Tengen would release a port for the NES as well, which was a significant visual downgrade, of course, but had its steering recalibrated for a D-pad, and as a result is significantly more enjoyable to play — and master at a high level — than the Midway Arcade Treasures ports.

The NES edition allows you to continue after failing to finish in first, but your points do reset. Luckily, your wrench upgrades carry over from one continue to the next, so your score is the only real victim here — it’s not like the game then asks you to Gradius Syndrome your way through a late-game track without any of the upgrades that got you to that point to begin with. Like with Championship Sprint, the NES port is just a two-player game maximum, which makes sense given that’s how many controllers you could plug into the console at a time, anyway.

The NES edition does play a little differently in a few ways since it can’t 100 percent replicate the arcade experience. For instance, sometimes it’s fine to hit an oil slick if you won’t crash into a wall from it or see yourself fall behind, since it clears said slick and resets what’s on screen — maybe a wrench cycles in, maybe some point pickups. The game is missing the helpful directional arrows, so now you have to either guess correctly which way the road is actually going, or follow a lead car on the first lap to see for yourself which way to go before plowing ahead.

One thing the NES game has going for it — other than that you can play it at home — is that the car’s engines make a satisfying hum sound as your car is moving: in the arcade edition, sound effects for power-ups and spin outs and crashes are the ones that were designed to draw in players overhearing others playing or the demo mode. At home, though, it’s that engine hum that dominates. It actually feels a little weird without it, when you go back and play the arcade version through, say, Midway Arcade Treasures, where you also lack the steering wheel and have to maneuver via analog stick. At least if you come upon an actual cabinet — I did have the chance to experience the game that way at the American Classic Arcade Museum — you get the steering wheel experience. Big turns, baby. The biggest.

Championship Sprint was not the end of the line for the Sprint series. Badlands was a post-apocalyptic two-player variant released in 1989. And in 2024, Atari revived the series for NeoSprint, which ups the limit to eight cars and increases the features and modes — a campaign! a tracker builder! — while retaining the overall simple gameplay. Unlike Super Sprint, you can get this one in the present, and pretty much anywhere: it’s available on Steam, Switch, Playstation 4/5, and Xbox Series S|X.

Still, though, it would be something if the actual Super Sprint could find its way back to your living room in the present. Atari has certainly been keen on revivals and re-releases, but Warner Bros. owns Midway and its game catalog now, which complicates matters both in terms of Atari actually getting its hands on these titles for themselves in the present, or for someone like Hamster to come in and get these western arcade titles out on the Arcade Archives service. It’s good to have hope, though. And also emulation, when the former doesn’t pan out.

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