Formula One video games
video game series
Ever since Pole Position in 1982, Formula One (F1) has always played a part of the racing genre in video games. Early Formula One games were typically arcade racing games, before Formula One Grand Prix (1991) popularized Formula One racing simulations on home computers.
History
Early roots and arcade games (1974–1990s)
The roots of Formula One games can be traced back to 1974, with arcade racing games such as Speed Race by Taito and Gran Trak 10 by Atari which depicted F1-like cars going on a race track.
Two years later, F-1 (1976) by Namco has been cited as the first truly Formula One arcade game, but it was an electro-mechanical game, rather than an arcade video game.
The first successful Formula One video game in arcade history was Pole Position (1982), by Namco. In Pole Position, the player has to complete a lap in a certain amount of time in order to qualify for a race at the Fuji racetrack. After qualifying, the player had to face other cars in a championship race. The game was very successful and it spawned an official sequel, Pole Position II, and an unofficial one, Final Lap. After the success of Pole Position, many similar games appeared in arcades (and later ported to home computers) such as TX-1 (1983).
During the late 1980s, successful arcade games included Super Sprint, which uses the top view instead of the rear view of most games, and its sequel Championship Sprint.
The public source identifies “Formula One video games” as video game series. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Formula, video and games.
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This entry incorporates text from “Formula One video games” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.