![]() Players began developing emulator programs of their own, reading live frame-related cues onscreen to auto-shift and blip the throttle. This was all well and good (though there were lots of naysayers) until the last year or so, when people began to take a hard look at it and, with technical savvy that didn’t exist in the 1980s, started disassembling the now-mythical performance. ![]() In explaining how he reached a score that even the developer did not expect, he explained he started in second gear and downshifted at the end to create his record-breaking run (a technique of which he claimed that the designer was unaware). Although he had no photographic or other evidence of the record, Rogers’ stature in the community allowed the record to be entered. So, when Todd Rogers, who is credited with being the first paid professional gamer, allegedly busted off a 5.51 in 1982, he set a mark that has stood as the record throughout time, and was the Guinness Books of World Records’ longest-standing record. Nationals, followed quickly at the event by a 5.48.) (At the time, NHRA’s best-ever run was still Garlits’ 5.63 we wouldn’t see a 5.54 in real life until Gary Beck popped one off at the 1982 U.S. that could ever be recorded in the game was 5.54 seconds. When Dave Crane created the game for Activision, it was theorized (but not documented) that the quickest e.t. The trick was to shift before blowing your engine and then keep your revs high by repeatedly tapping the stick (engaging and disengaging the clutch), again and again without going too far. Mashing the red button controlled the gas and moving the joystick to the left worked the clutch and to the right shifted gears. It’s a fairly simple game (with stick-figure 1980s graphics) with the very basic Atari joystick. I’ve also played on organized teams (clans) in online tournaments (first-person shooters, not racing games, though I’ve done that online, too), so let’s just say the whole thing very much interests me.īut back to Dragster. ![]() I played all of the early drag racing video games, from Gamestar’s Top Fuel Eliminator (for Apple IIe) to Cosmi’s Shirley Muldowney’s Top Fuel Challenge (for Commodore 64) to Family Software’s Drag Race Eliminator (for IBM), and was a consultant and beta tester for Tantrum Entertainment’s breakthrough PC game, NHRA Drag Racing. My parents bought us a Pong system -– literally a very basic tennis game with two rectangular paddles that moved up and down and batted a square "ball" back and forth - when it first game out in the early 1970s, and I followed with Atari 2600, Intellivision, ColecoVision, and Nintendo systems before going computer gaming for a decade. It didn't have a lot of power, and the graphics were pretty rudimentary, but it open up a whole lot of possibilities and killed a lot of weekends (and relationships) for many of us.įor what’s it’s worth, by Controller Cred is pretty high. The game in question is Dragster, a 1980 offering for the Atari 2600 home gaming system, a platform that is among the grandparents of every video game console out there. It’s kind of an offbeat topic for this column, but I’m intrigued, and it’s all about drag racing, so here we go. It’s not often that drag racing becomes a hot topic in the video game subculture, but it happened earlier this year when a 35-year-old world record was disqualified from Guinness’ video-gaming world record lists. ![]() That’s not about to happen but there’s an interesting news parallel I just discovered. Imagine, all these years later, someone trying to disqualify Don Garlits’ mind-blowing 5.63-second run from the 1975 World Finals –- a record that stood for seven years -– because it just doesn’t seem technically feasible.
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