How to play Pole Position online
- Steer: left and right arrow keys
- Gears: up for low gear, down for high gear
- Accelerate: hold Z (the lower buttons). Brake: X (the upper buttons)
- Choose the race or practice run: the minus key (the keypad’s * key)
- Choose the number of laps, 1 to 8: the equals key (the keypad’s # key)
- Start the qualifying lap: Enter
- Pause: P. Pause followed by Enter abandons the race and returns to the qualifying lap.
The cartridge also works with the Atari Trak-Ball; here the emulator uses the joystick. Full screen and save states are in the emulator toolbar (move the mouse over the screen).
Gameplay
Every game starts with a qualifying lap on your own. Get round in 73 seconds or less and you make the grid, in eighth place; faster laps earn better starting positions and a bigger position bonus, and 58.5 seconds or under takes pole position with 4,000 bonus points. Miss the cut and you simply drive on until the 90-second race timer runs out.
The race begins from a four-light countdown. You start in low gear, which tops out at 105 mph, and shift to high for up to 195 mph once rolling. Finishing the first lap inside 75 seconds extends your time, and every lap you beat the timer buys more, until the final lap; miss it once and you are out. Hitting another car or a roadside sign makes your car explode; you carry on, but lost seconds are lost points. The kerbs and grass can be driven on but slow you down. You score 50 points for every 5 metres, 50 for each car passed and 200 for each second left on the timer at the finish. There are four courses, in order of difficulty: a Practice Run with no other cars, the Malibu Grand Prix (the default), the Namco Speedway and the Atari Grand Prix, over 1 to 8 laps.
Tips
- Be moving the instant the car appears. The qualifying lap is where a good start matters most.
- Hold the inside line. It is faster, and it is easier to drift out from the inside on a bend than to cut back in from the outside.
- Full throttle on the straights. That is where time is made up; avoid skids, which let the pack catch you.
- Drop to low gear for a quick slow-down. Downshifting works alongside the brake, as it did in the arcade.
The story behind Pole Position on the 5200
Namco released Pole Position in Japan in September 1982, and Atari put it in North American arcades that November. It was the first racing game laid out on a real circuit, Fuji Speedway, and the first to make you qualify before racing. It was the highest-grossing arcade game in North America in both 1983 and 1984, selling over 21,000 cabinets in the United States, and Electronic Games named it coin-op game of the year for 1983.
The 5200 cartridge was written at General Computer Corporation by Mike Horowitz and Betty Ryan Tylko and released in September 1983, a month after the Atari 2600 version. According to AtariProtos it keeps almost everything from the arcade apart from the roadside billboards for other Atari games and the “Prepare to qualify” speech. Unlike the Atari computer port, which accelerates on its own, it gives you a real accelerator and a brake button, and the non-centring 5200 stick suits steering well. A 1984 review in Hi-Res thought the graphics were the strongest part and the playability limited. Both the 2600 version and the 7800 sequel are on this site.
