I Think This Was The First Home Racing Video Game To Simulate A Manual Transmission

I’ve been meaning to write about this interesting footnote at the crossroads of automotive and video game history and interests for some time, but kept putting it off, because that’s just how things always seem to work. You have something you want to write about, then a bunch of other stuff comes up, and you forget. Well, partially thanks to today’s Juneteenth holiday, I finally remembered to write about this thing, what I believe is the first application of a driving video game that includes a simulation of a standard H-pattern manual transmission. This is important stuff!

So, you’re probably wondering what the possible Juneteenth angle to all of this is, and I don’t blame you. It’s a touch convoluted, but I think still valid. You see, that first driving game to feature a simulation of shifting a manual transmission came on a cartridge, and that cartridge played on the very first video game system to ever use interchangeable cartridges with unique games stored on them, the Fairchild Channel F.

And the lead engineer for the Fairchild Channel F was one of the few Black pioneers of the then infant video game industry, Jerry Lawson. And yes, because Lawson is Black, Juneteenth seemed like a good time to highlight this remarkable pioneer of the video game industry.

I happen to have an old but still mostly working Fairchild Channel F, so I made a little reel talking about Lawson and showing the 9th Videocart for the system, which held the game known as Drag Race:

 

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I’ll get into some more details about Drag Race in a bit; first I want to talk about Lawson a bit more, because he’s a really interesting guy. He was one of those people who seemed to find the thing they wanted to pursue in life – in Lawson’s case, that was electronics – and then stayed with it persistently even if the world around them was just barely ready. For example, Lawson may have been one of the very first people to have an actual computer in his home, somewhere between 1970 and 1972, when Lawson was working for the semiconductor company Fairchild.

Remember, people simply didn’t have computers in their homes back then. The very first simple hobbyist home computers didn’t really come around until the MITS Altair in 1974, and that was far different from what Lawson had, which was a Digital PDP-8 computer that was about the size of a small refrigerator, and that’s not counting the peripheral cabinets.

Here’s a promo pic of a PDP-8 in the back of a convertible VW Beetle, just to give you an idea and give me an excuse to stick a Beetle in here:

As he describes it in a 2009 interview,

“And before that, I also had — Fairchild gave me a DEC PDP-8. I put the PDP-8 back into work. In fact, the PDP-8 is a story in itself — that ended up running a school in my garage. With the PDP-8, I had two tape units, the tape controller, a high speed tape reader, and all the maintenance boards and backup spares for it. My garage became a service depot.

DEC said I had the only operating PDP-8 — straight 8 — west of the Mississippi. And they asked me if they could run classes in my garage on it. As a result — my PDP-8 had a control unit on it called the TC01. And the TC01 didn’t have all the maintenance updates on it. They said it would cost about ten grand to update it, and I said, “Well heck, I’m not paying ten grand.” So they said — for them having the class in my garage with the guys there — they would do the updates for free. They did. The whole updates for free.”

Lawson was pretty hardcore, as you can gather.

Lawson got the role at Fairchild, an electronics component company, to head up their skunkworks home video game console project after management discovered that Lawson had built his own arcade video game machine on his own. Instead of getting all bent out of shape at this potential moonlighting, they gave him control of the project that would become the VES, or Video Entertainment System, later renamed to Channel F.

Lawson adapted a prototype from a company called Alpex, and he and his team refined the ideas contained in that crude start. They adapted the machine to use Fairchild’s own two-chip F8 CPU, making the Channel F the first console to use a microprocessor, also a huge deal, they refined the cartridge concept, which was something (putting computer memory chips in a plastic shell and allowing them to be plugged and unplugged over and over again) that had never been tried before, Lawson had the clunky keypad controls turned into hand controllers that incorporated joystick and paddle-like functions into one unit, and he gave the console some personality, which can be seen in details like how the early tic-tac-toe game would call you a turkey if you lost, something Lawson enjoyed calling people.

It was a big deal about the cartridge concept never really having been tested. As Lawson says in that interview:

“We were afraid — we didn’t have statistics on multiple insertion and what it would do, and how we would do it, because it wasn’t done. I mean, think about it: nobody had the capability of plugging in memory devices in mass quantity like in a consumer product. Nobody.”

There’s also a good part in the interview describing Lawson answering complaint calls from buyers of the console the day after Christmas 1976:

Yeah, I’ll tell you what happened. The first year we put out the Fairchild video game, I made the mistake of going to work the day after Christmas. The day after Christmas in the consumer business is called “Hell day.” Why it’s called “Hell day” is because that is when everything comes back to the store, and the person couldn’t use it.

So I start getting calls — there’s nobody in the factory except the guard and me. I’m there in the plant to take care of some paperwork. He starts transferring calls to me. They had one guy call me, and he wanted to know where the batteries go. I said, “There is no batteries.” He took the thing apart looking for a battery in there!

One guy called up and said, “Dog urine hurt the game.” The dog lifted his leg and peed on it!

And one of the things that really cracked me up is that I was starting to get really jaded by answering the phone, right? One woman called up, really irate, and she said, “My game hums! Do you know why?” And I said, “‘Cause it doesn’t know the words, lady.”

Good to know about that dog urine.

Anyway, let’s get to the automotive part, here the 1977 Videocart #9 game, Drag Race.

As you can see on the label, Fairchild was careful to include a diagram of a standard H-pattern 4-speed shifter, so even kids would know how to select gears. There’s no clutch, as such, but you do shift with the controller. You rotate the controller knob as the sort of throttle, and that affects your tachometer. You can blow the engine or stall if you don’t shift at the right time, too.

So, the way it works is that you watch the “Christmas tree” lights in the center to count down from red, to blue to green, then again, red, blue, green. The Channel F had no yellow, so blue stands in. When the second green hits, you shift into first, give it throttle, and take off, being careful to upshift before you blow your engine.

Here’s a pretty good video of the game in action:

Simple? Absolutely. Fun? Ehhh, kinda? By 1977 standards? Sure! We were all high on lead from gasoline then, anyway. Really, the whole game is manual transmission shifting! That’s the core of it all! Watch the tach, listen to the engine noises, and shift at the right time. Do it better than your opponent, and you win!

Good times, right? Really, this may be the most manual-shifting-focused game ever. Well, minus the clutch part, but still. I wonder how many Gen X kids got their first taste of manual transmissions from this game?