Driving video game

1972–1988: Top-down 2D racing video games

Atari founder Nolan Bushnell had the idea for a driving video game in the early 1970s. When he was a college student, he worked at an arcade where he became familiar with EM driving games, watching customers play and helping to maintain the machinery, while learning how it worked and developing his understanding of how the game business operates. When he founded Atari, Bushnell had originally planned to develop a driving video game, influenced by Speedway, but they ended up developing Pong (1972) instead.