Hard Drivin' review: the arcade car you could actually stall

You climb into a seat, and there is a clutch pedal and a steering wheel that pushes back against your hands. Most kids at the mall had never driven a real car. This was the first time an arcade treated them like they were about to.

A car with weight

Hard Drivin' features one of the first 3D polygon driving environments, and it looks bare now: flat colored shapes, a sky, a road. But it moves like a place instead of a picture. You can turn around, see a building from another side, and understand where the road goes. Put that together with a haptic vibrating steering wheel, and the car feels heavy.

Choose the manual transmission and it gets serious. There is a clutch pedal, and yes, you can stall. The first time the engine dies at a starting line in front of your friends is a memory nobody forgets. But get the shifting right and you feel faster than anyone on the automatic, because you are doing more of the driving.

Other racing games let you steer. This one let you stall, and that is why it felt real.

The stunt track

The course splits in two. One side is built for speed. The other has a vertical loop and an open drawbridge, and the whole cabinet dares you to take it. Hit the loop too slow and you fall. Hit the drawbridge wrong and you land short. The physics are the reason it works: the car was modeled with Doug Milliken, and it behaves like a car, not a toy.

Crash, and the game shows you an instant replay from a wide aerial view, so you watch your own mistake from above. Then it puts you back at the last reached waypoint and the clock keeps running. It is a little humiliating, and it teaches you more than any instructions could.

The cabinet that almost did not ship

It was expensive to build. One Atari vice president argued that nobody would buy an arcade cabinet for US$10,000, and the game only moved forward after research said operators would. Standing next to it, you could believe the price. Score high enough and you race the Phantom Photon, a ghost car that shows you what a perfect lap looks like.

What it meant back then

In American arcades Hard Drivin' was the sit-down machine near the front, the one with a small crowd watching the replay screen. Teenagers who were a year or two away from a learner's permit lined up to try the clutch. Dads at the bowling alley sat down to show off and stalled just like everyone else. It was the closest thing to driving that a pocket of quarters could buy.

Playing it now

The graphics are simple and the controls ask for patience. Take the automatic first, learn the loop, then switch to manual and feel the difference. Few driving games since have cared this much about what your feet were doing.