Let’s Look At Some Of The Cars On Early Atari Cartridge Art: Cold Start

Aside from cars, my other geeky obsession are archaic ’70s and ’80s computers and video games. I love the crudeness, the cleverness, and the incredibly severe limitations that forced creativity.

That sort of thing excites me because I’m, you know, a weirdo.

One detail of this early video game/computer era that I especially like is the art created for the boxes and physical media of the game, because it had to be wildly imaginative to help the buyer see those colossal, chunky stacks of pixels as something real and exciting. Today, let’s look at the cars portrayed on two 1978 Atari VCS (later called the 2600) cartridges, Night Driver and Slot Racers.

On-screen, cars were portrayed with a pretty widely varying degree of detail and accuracy over the life of the Atari 2600. There’s some examples above: you can see how the cars ranged from simple, blocky, single color icons to quite detailed dragsters to multi-colored and shaded overhead race cars.

These two games we’re looking at today, though, were very early releases, and the cars on-screen are pretty crude. Here’s Night Driver:

This is a first-person perspective game, through the windshield, and you can see the blocky blue nose of your car, which seems to be an open-wheeler. Other cars are rendered with a bit more detail, including headlights and some detail of some kind on the windshield.

Slot Racers is even cruder:

This one is really more of a maze/shooting game than a driving game, and the cars are reduced to these T-shaped little icons. But let’s look closer at how the cars are portrayed on the Slot Racers label: 

These cars are clearly fantastical products of the artist, John Enright’s, imagination though that lower one reminds me a bit of a Lancia Stratos with that wraparound windshield. Sort of. The one in the background’s rear, with that full-width taillight, strangely predicts the rear of the Acura NSX, which wouldn’t appear until 12 years later. I mean, kind of? The rest is pure Syd Meade-style fantasy.

At the other extreme, we have Night Driver’s art, which was done by Steve Hendricks, which takes a far more realistic approach:

Weirdly, the cover art here portrays an actual race, instead of how the actual game plays, which is of a dangerous loon driving into oncoming traffic on what appears to be a neverending and public rural road. The cars here are easily recognizable, iconic racing cars: in front we have what looks like a Porsche 935 slantnose, and the racing versions of these eliminated the pop-up lights in favor of low-set ones.

Hot on its tail is what mostly looks like a BMW 3.0 CSL race car, and I can’t really make out the details of the further trailing cars. These are both great picks of cars for this label, genuine racing icons; it’s just kind of a shame they really don’t relate to the gameplay.

There’s a lot of old video game labels with cars on them, so I bet we’ll be doing more of these, if you can stand them!