Talk:Night Driver (video game)

message: Midnight Racer is a game that Midway bought in January 1976 (before Night Driver came out) and then later released as 280 ZZZAP (after Night Driver came out). 'But, I've read reports that Night Driver was also based on the Midnight Racer game. It's interesting if it's true, but I'm unable to really confirm it. The similarities between Midnight Racer and Night Driver are amazing, but stranger things have happened. Can anyone confirm this? -Mee Ronn 4 July 2005 22:14 (UTC)
:See below Dave Shepperd 01:37, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Midnight Racer 

message: In 1976 I was shown a picture of a cabinet with a small portion of the screen visible. On the screen were 3 or 4 little squares that I took to be roadside reflectors. I don't recall if the picture I was shown was on the front of an actual flyer for a game or a Xerox copy of same or it could have even been hand drawn nor do I remember what the name of the game was. I seem to remember somebody telling me it was a German game, but I could easily be wrong about this. In any case, I didn't see any game play and I have no memory of discovering any details from the paper I was shown about how that game played or even if it was anything more than someone's notion of a game. This was likely done on purpose in order to avoid being accused of ripping someone off; not that we'd cared too much about that in 1976 :). My charge was to make a game and Night Driver is the result. The hardware was designed by Terry Fowler and he took what we called MOC-16 hardware (Motion Object Control-16 for 16 individually controllable items) and greatly simplified it because it only had to draw little boxes rather than the more typical graphics. The MOC-16 hardware was designed by the fellows at our Cyan Engineering office in Grass Valley, Ca. I believe the two guys responsible for that hardware were Steve Mayer and Ron Milner. I don't believe it could be said that Night Driver was based on any other game since I hadn't actually seen any similar gameplay. But it could be said that having seen a partial picture of a screen with a few little boxes on it, the idea for Night Driver came to life. Dave Shepperd 01:37, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Night Driver History 

message: Higher speeds were achievable on the most advanced track than with either of the "easier" two track choices.  In order to achieve higher speeds you, of course, had to go longer without crashing.  The sharper curves of the advanced track actually helped you to get to the higher speeds more quickly. In fact, even if you never crashed during the entire time on either of the other two tracks, you would never reach a speed routinely achievable by a good player on the expert track.  The more times you achieved success in going around the tight curves without crashing the faster your speed.  Bear in mind I am talking here of pedal floored continuously with NO throttle lift-off.
I had thought, at the time, that the speed with which the white strips wizzed by was an exaggeration.  While in Amherst, MA I then had the occassion to be in a car -- a turbo-charged Capri (Mercury version of Mustang) -- wherein the driver got up to 110 mph.  I changed my mind:  the white strips on Night Driver were no exaggeration.
As far as scoring, a truly good player -- which I most certainly was -- would wrap-around the 3-digit scorer.  So a good score might be something like 042 -- meaning 1,042.
To negotiate the hard/sharp left-followed-by-quick-right, the expert Night Driver player wouldn't even "turn" the steering wheel.  Rather the motion was more like a wrist spasm in a ballistic inward motion followed by a ballistic outward motion as if you bounced a superball off a hard surface.  These were quick (to say the least), but fairly small amplitude motions.  I doubt real cars would turn like that -- let alone the obvious impossibility of making your wrist do that in the steering of a real car.
At any rate, one of the ironies was that once you got up to a blinding speed, the hard-left-right-in-quick-succession actually became easier to negotiate than at intermediate speeds.  So why did you ever crash there?  Well sometimes you wouldn't; you'd crash elsewhere.  But when you did crash there it wasn't because you didn't have the "spasm-and-reverse" wrist motion down, but because you couldn't possibly initiate the spasm at the precise millisecond required (eventually anyway).
On the hardware:  some very very old games existed and were nominally in play for coin-op use as little as about 6 years ago (around 2001) -- for example at Kennywood Amuzement Park (Pittsburgh, PA).  The status was only nominally in-service because the hardware flaw had to do with the steering wheel interface sensing.  The wheel would physically turn fine, but the sensing was so off as to make the game essentially useless.
In its heydey, Night Driver was a main attraction in the arcades of Wildwood NJ where there would be contests and winners would get free T-shirts.  I won one for the high score. 199.196.144.11 18:05, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Play Characteristics of the Arcade Machine:  Speeds and Scores 

message: While this game was ported to Atari 2600 the screen shot and other parts of the page do not directly relate to the Atari 2600 version. Should the category be removed? 59.167.152.98 (talk)  —Preceding comment was added at 11:49, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Atari 2600 category