"HEEEEEEY! YOU LOOK LIKE A REAL JERK! YOU'RE GOING TO PLAY POLE POSITIOOOOOOON!"

The Ms. Pac-Man plug-n-play joystick had this game, and they actually had the joystick turn left and right to simulate the analog steering wheel. It was actually quite fun for the novelty of it all. I also played this on the Atari 2600, and, considering it's the Atari 2600, it's actually a good port for what it is. Also, it's in Return of Arcade on Windows.

The game itself is an early racing game. It's got some good sprite scaling, it's got some weird turning I could never get used to (especially at the really sharp left turn), and the other racers are just glorified obstacles. It is a huge leap over older racing games, but racing games will only get better from here with games like Out Run. It's a classic.

Bon ! Euh... bah, j'y ai joué sur Atari 2600. Et comme tout jeu Atari 2600, c'est mauvais pour aujourd'hui, mais, c'est un jeu de 1982. C'est là qu'on comprend, qu'il faut le remettre dans le contexte de l'époque !

C'est mon jeu préféré de la console. Avec un seul bouton et un joystick, les développeurs ont réussi à porter à merveille le jeu en donnant de la profondeur au gameplay. Pour de l'Atari 2600, le jeu est très beau ! C'est un des meilleurs jeux de la console, bien qu'il ait affreusement mal vieilli !

Most likely the best racing game at the time of its release. It took all of the individual concepts that had been put out and copied dozens of times, and polished all of them into one compact little package. A proper race track, qualifying lap, F1 cars that actually looked like F1 cars, a good sense of speed, and even a race queen waving the checkered flag. Given all of this attention to detail, it's lazy for the game to just drop cars on to the track when the race starts in an attempt to constantly give you someone to be racing against. The absolutely nails-on-chalkboard tire screech when you turn hard is another literal pain point.

Absolutely the best racing game on the Atari 2600 (at least in my personal experience). It's absolutely insane how good the graphics stayed even when moving from arcade to the Atari. I didn't grow up when games having graphics like this were impressive, hell Metal Gear Solid 1 came out around the time I shot out the womb, but I did grow up in a home that only had an Atari as video game entertainment for a bit, so comparing Pole Position to something like Stampede when I was growing up made it really stick out to me. I genuinely look back at Pole Position and continue to be shocked by how much they could get on that little wooden box of a console with this thing. Obviously, if I want to play a racing game right here right now, Pole Position probably wouldn't be my first choice, but for what it was in 1982, it's fucking crazy.

The arcade is really great too to my understanding, though I've personally never played it. I imagine it being really important in racing games as it's probably one of the earlier arcade racing games to have the player angle follow in a 3rd-person sort of view rather than top down like the majority of the (very few) racing games of the 1970s. This 3rd-person view is the format that racing games still follow to this very day. I dunno, my pre-arcade Pole Position knowledge is honestly just from me going down a rabbit-hole of watching old racing arcade games on YouTube, so I might be missing some obvious 3rd-person view racing game but all I can currently think of is Turbo (1981) and I'm just going to say that while that game is also impressive, it's ugly as fuck, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

This and Enduro are great racing games if you have any interest in seeing what some of the best of the best were for the Atari 2600.

4.5/5

(atari-produced usdm cabinet)
the realest of racing roots.

one track, one pedal, 2 gears, infinity degrees of movement on the steering wheel (really?!?!) it does everything it needs to do: be a damn good open wheel (as in formula [number]) racing game for the arcade market of 1982. letting off the gas or a quick shift into low is the most controllable way to lose speed for the tighter corners, but exploding into fellow vehicles on the track will lose you The Most Speed. The biggest flaw with this game is the use of an endless encoder for steering, akin to tempest's knob, might even be the same part but with a deep dish wheel attached. a spartan, landmark "pretend car" experience, served one checkpoint at a time. a response to sega's Turbo, but it would quickly be usurped by sega's response to it. might have felt better if the cabinet had any sort of lock or return-to-center on the steering, as i tended to overcorrect when coming out of turns, but the wheel rim itself was about the same diameter as what's in my civic, around 330mm!!! most arcade cabs have like 280mm-ish wheels.

(additionally, while the sit-down cabinet is most ideal, if you play the standiup cabinet with stool you end up with a driving position not unlike a truck/lorry)

I think I've finally played this game long enough to at least understand how to be good at it. As in, I finally made it past the qualification round. Still have no idea how to make it past more than one racer on the track, but IDK I feel very accomplished with where I am after years of not understanding this game on the Ms. Pac-Man plug-n-play.

Good fanfare too, probably one of my favorites in the classic Namco lineup? It's admirable, I support Pole Position even if I'm convinced I'll never actually be good at it.

There's an evolution of racing games that spawned some revolutionary milestones. However, realistic simulations to me weren't a thing until Formula 1 or TOCA on the PlayStation. Until then, I had enjoyed playing titles like Super Cars 2 on the Amiga, RC Pro Am on the Gameboy and finally almost perfect fun racers Super Mario Kart and Rock'n'Roll Racing on the SNES.

There had been attempts on simulating before of course on almost any machine and Pole Position for the Atari VCS 2600 was my first contact, that I actually had to stick with for plenty of years. It feels like an old man, reporting of how hard times were back in the day, but this joke of a game really is all we had.

I had the chance to play the Pole Position arcade cockpit as well and even though it is simple and comparable to technical limitations of a Master System or NES game, maybe, except for offering more realistic steering peripherals, it is definitely something for early 80s. It's probably enjoyable for a quarter or two even today, if you're into checking out history and Virtua Racing is occupied.

On VCS, like almost any arcade port since Pac-Man, it suffers heavily from technical possibilities. There's really just a lump of pixels representing your car, though at least the tires have different colour than the body. The opponents don't. Those are just a yellow mess. The Sound is a good equivalent to the fart app I once downloaded to my cell phone.

My nostalgia for Pole Position relies mostly on how we used to play with it. Whilst it hardly does any more than those backlit Tomy racing playsets some of us owned in the 80s, it also works quite similar incorporating your imagination. Just like we've role played being fighter pilots playing Top Gun or being Luke Skywalker while playing Solaris, Pole Position was our chance being Niki Lauda or any other preferred driver.

That on one hand is something magical I miss in most recent games, on the other a game like Pole Position has so many blanks to fill in, that I really don't know how to sell it to anyone today. It is one thing if there's nothing else available, but if there's so much more on offer, why would you pick a game that doesn't at least have some kick ass mechanics to draw you in?

Let's face it, what we spend (well earned?) pocket money on ages ago probably wasn't even a bang for a buck back in the day. We just had to make the best of it speeding up, steering left and right like an idiot and turn the volume down to a minimum. And concerning imagination, once we had access to Hang-On for Master System or Test Drive for Amiga, Pole Position was swiftly forgotten.

There are good games on Atari's VCS 2600, but it just wasn't the time for racing in home environment. For instance, I played more hours of Pac-Kong, which is a horrible platformer, than I ever did of Pole Position.
I like the artwork of my copy though and with the memories of how we played as kids, often with the box and manual as the only blueprint to what those blocks could possibly represent, it might stay in the collection forever.