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