The Drag Race and the Super Bug... - Originally published on 1UP - March 16, 2009

Hello friends, today we'll begin looking at cars in video games. This series will not be a review of every major car game published. I will not talk about motorcycle or even flying car games like F-Zero and Wipeout because they don't meet my criteria. I will miss a lot of major players in the racing genre because of those limitations. Not every game will be about racing, some will be action / adventures, others puzzle games and a few will simply be about driving with no purpose in mind. This series will not move chronologically between the present and the past either. What I will do is try to deconstruct the origins and influences of car titles by finding relationships between them. I will share why these games were important to me. To let you know well in advance there are two titles that I will not mention in the entire series, so don't ask what happened to...

When it comes to cars in gaming I can be a little obsessive compulsive. Perhaps not as obsessive as the people that wrote about every VW Beetle in computer and video games but still pretty obsessive. Of course the same obsessive traits could be said about all my other hobbies. Everything that I am interested in says a little bit about me. If you see all of the things that interest me then you'll get a good idea of who I am. When it comes to racing games I am very particular. Only the best of most unique ideas can hold my attention. Those that get under my skin stay with me for years, or even decades. I talked about my appreciation of Sega's track design aesthetic it a long time ago with the blog Almost Sega good. Finally we'll get around to talking about the games these tracks belonged to.

The first two titles come from some of my earliest arcade memories. 1977's Drag Race and SuperBug by Atari and Kee Games respectively. I was barely three-years-old when these games came out. Thankfully like a lot of arcades the late 70's and early 80's was a transition period. The last of the great pinball machines were slowly being weaned out by first generation of videogames. I was fortunate enough to enjoy the best of both worlds during my formative years. By the time I was able to understand the controls of Drag Race it too was being replaced by newer games. However my love of cars blended with this new form of entertainment and I was hooked from then on.

Arcade cabinets were very gimmicky in the early days. Bright colors and unique layouts helped differentiate them from the crowd. Drag Race was one of those cabinets that immediately caught my eye. It had a split screen, in (limited) color, when so many other games were still in black and white. Two sets of steering wheels, gas pedals and a gearshift as well. This was an electronic version of one of my favorite forms of racing, this was the future!

Drag racing has its roots in hot rod culture. For as long as people have had cars they've wanted to go fast. As a kid my obsession was highlighted in the televised rivalries of people like Don "the Snake" Prudhomme and Tom "the Mongoose" McEwen. I was taught to respect women as Shirley Muldowney and her pink dragster put up awesome races against the legend Don Garlits. My collection of Hot Wheels grew exponentially to reflect this newfound love of drag racing.

The magic of the Atari game was in the balancing of all the dragster components. Keeping a careful eye on the RPM's, knowing when to shift and how much gas to give the dragster. Push the pedal too hard or miss a shift and you would get a blown engine. Avoiding the walls through touchy steering also kept arcade players on edge and the races close. This game, like the sport, wasn't for everyone. Often times I would find it alone in the arcade. Atari like the rest of the industry were experimenting will all sorts of arcade games. Experimenting with control schemes and features just to get players interested. While Drag Race was a niche game in a (then) niche part of the entertainment industry, the idea of shifting gears and combining with a gas pedal was a welcome advancement.

Kee Games came out with a racing game called Super Bug that same year. It used a similar gear shift setup but this was more of a road racing experience. Even as a kid I found it funny that oil slicks and sand were clearly marked in the game. Although the game was in black and white it seemed to attract more players than Drag Race. In addition to driving and racing I was attracted to the cabinets because of the bright graphics. Early arcade cabinets had to compete for attention against the better painted and better illustrated pinball machines. The in-game graphics of arcade machines weren't doing the job so designers had to sell the game with good art. The most memorable cabinet illustrations sold us on a theme or plot. The illustration on Drag Race was very colorful, it had a lot of late 70's / early 80's design aesthetics going for it, helping it stand out from the crowd.

I never thought I'd live to see the day that the in-game graphics were as good or better than the cabinet art. Those days eventually came but there is something to admire in classic arcade cabinet art. The mascot character for the Superbug looked very much like a Dave Deal illustration. Of course I wouldn't learn about Deal until much later, but as a kid I loved the exaggerated proportions on those cartoon cars.

While they lasted in the local arcade I managed to enjoy them immensely. Unfortunately both games didn't remain too long in the arcade as the next round of driving and racing titles were coming in. So where did the legacy of those early driving experiences of Superbug and Drag Race lead to? Come back tomorrow to find out.

Did you ever play any of the first generation of arcade racing games? Let me know in the comments section please. As always if you would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!

The Car Tangent, part 11...

A lifetime ago I wrote about the influential artist and hot rod pioneer "Big Daddy" Ed Roth. In case you were not familiar with the man he was the one that created Rat Fink and a plethora of bug-eyed, sharp toothed, drooling monsters riding on top of various hot rods. He would airbrush these grotesque figures on tee shirts and sell them at car shows. Teenagers bought them up and car clubs commissioned him to create mascots and paint jackets for them. All of this helped pay for his creative outlets. Roth was one of the first designers to create mock-up car bodies by hand and sculpt them out of fiberglass. The hot rod scene was still growing in Southern California when Roth took it into radical new directions. He demonstrated to fans that they did not always have to start with a rusted-out car and then strip it down before bolting on a powerful engine. They could create their own bodies and make them as wild as his cartoons were if they wanted to.

Roth ran with a circle of artists that shared a similar aesthetic. They were also capable of drawing monsters but more important, were able to caricature every car they came across. Ed "Newt" Newton and Dave "Big" Deal were in a class all their own. The artists became synonymous with cartoon cars. The small tires in the front, large tires in the back and smoke blowing out of the rear became a hot rod trademark. Few artists could do it better than Roth, Newt or Deal. These monsters and cars were released on collectable sticker packs, think of them as the forefathers of the Garbage Pail Kids phenomenon. The thing that all the artists had in common were that they knew their cars and motorcycles. When they were not building and fabricating them they were known to race them as well in So Cal and even through Baja Mexico. This was "on the job" training that few cartoonists could have claimed.

No matter how exaggerated the shapes were people could clearly make out the type of cars that were being featured. The artists were masters of observation. They knew the position of the lights, bumpers, badges and lines of hundreds of vehicles. Good cartoonists learned the techniques of making a caricature out of a person but not every cartoonist could caricature a vehicle. The godfathers of hot rod art made it look deceptively easy but I would challenge an artist reading this to try and make aesthetically pleasing caricatures out of the next car they see.

Roth, Newt and Deal managed to build a career on their art. While they did not necessarily work for the Big Three, they still shaped American car culture. They captured the zeitgeist of the hot rod movement and visualized it. As the men became more and more influential within the community they began changing the perception of hot rod culture to the rest of the US. Model manufacturers like Revell turned the hot rods of Roth and Newt as well as the illustrations of Deal into model kits. For the first time kids got a chance to see actual 3D representations of the cars and monsters that they read about in the magazines. These models, toys and stickers forever warped the minds of young car buffs. As they got older they returned the favor. In the case of Pixar the boss guy John Lasseter and his brain trust were the kids that would have grown up with Rat Fink and his friends. They knew that they had to reach out to the master while developing the art and design of the Cars film.

Every car in the film oozed personality. Each character had its own temperament which seemed genuine based on the model of car that they were. The rusty Harvester tow truck talked with a country twang, the big city Porsche in a very no-nonsense intonation and the Fiat with a heavy Italian accent. The ways that each character was made to emote was superb cartooning. The animators used bumpers, fenders and tires in place of lips, shoulders and hands. The expressions were easy to read because the shapes of the cars were broken down and explained to the artists by Deal. Dave was working on pre-production for Cars 2 when he passed away in 2008. His fingerprints remained all over both films and the various Mater's Tall Tales Car-Toons. The Pixar artists and animators were exceptional in their craft, and many of them were passionate about automobiles but the Cars universe would have not been the same without the contributions of Dave Deal. On the other side of the Pacific there was a different sort of "car toon." Japan was not without its own skilled automobile artists. However they did not have a hot rod movement in the same way that the US did. They did have their own car culture and various youth sub-cultures that managed to interpret their love of the automobile in any number of ways. One of the best incorporated caricatures of cars in their work but remained relatively unknown for decades. The next blog will look at this person and their gift to the world. If you would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!