How to play Night Driver online
Night Driver was made for the Atari paddle controller: the knob was your steering wheel and the red button was your accelerator. The emulator above switches to paddle mode automatically for this game.
- Steer: left and right arrow keys
- Accelerate: hold the Space bar
- Choose a game variation: F11 (the console’s Select switch)
- Start the game: F12 (the console’s Reset switch)
- Top speed: F9 toggles the right difficulty switch
- Horn warning for oncoming cars: F4 toggles the left difficulty switch
- Switch between paddle and joystick mode: Alt + L
Gameplay
Your car sits at the bottom of the screen, and the road comes towards you, marked by pylons on both sides. You score points automatically as you pass invisible checkpoints along the course, so the faster you cover the road, the more you score. If you hit a pylon or an oncoming car, a crash scene appears on the screen. There is no gear stick in this version, unlike the arcade cabinet: you simply hold the button to go and let go to slow down.
Variations and switches
There are eight game variations. They combine four kinds of track with two ways of playing:
- Games 1 and 5: Novice course, the easiest
- Games 2 and 6: Pro course
- Games 3 and 7: Expert course, the hardest
- Games 4 and 8: Random course, different every time
Games 1 to 4 give you 90 seconds to score as much as you can. Games 5 to 8 have no time limit, so you can keep driving as long as you like. The right difficulty switch sets your top speed: A is fastest, B is slower and better for beginners. The left difficulty switch decides whether oncoming cars honk before they appear (B) or arrive without warning (A).
Tips
- Don’t oversteer. Small corrections keep you on the road. Big swings send you into the pylons.
- Ease off in tight bends. Letting go of the accelerator for a moment in a sharp curve costs less time than a crash.
- Learn a fixed course. Novice, Pro and Expert always use the same road, so you can memorise the bends. Random is for when you know them all.
- Start with the horn on. Keep the left difficulty switch on B until you can react to oncoming cars quickly.
- Practise in the untimed games. Games 5 to 8 let you learn a course without the clock running.
The story behind Night Driver
The arcade Night Driver came out in 1976 and is often described as one of the first games with real-time first-person graphics. Setting the race at night was a clever shortcut: the screen could stay mostly dark, and only the roadside posts had to be drawn. The arcade cabinet did not even draw your car; it was a printed insert placed at the bottom of the screen.
Rob Fulop’s 2600 version, released in 1980, went further than the original in some ways. It added colour, shows your car on screen, and puts other cars on the road as well as houses and trees at the roadside. It sold over 160,000 copies in 1980 alone, making it one of the year’s top five sellers, and passed 1.9 million copies by 1983. Sears also sold it under its own label.
Similar games to play next
- Enduro – Activision’s endurance race with day, night and fog
- Pole Position – the 2600 version of Namco’s arcade racer
- Street Racer – an early Atari paddle game with dodging and racing variations
- Indy 500 – top-down racing for two players
- Grand Prix – Activision’s side-scrolling race against the clock