Grand Prix

Grand Prix is David Crane's racing game for the Atari 2600, published by Activision in 1982. It is a time trial rather than a race: the other cars are obstacles, not competitors, and there is no field to finish ahead of. The track scrolls horizontally beneath an overhead view and the clock never stops.

Control is stripped to the minimum the hardware allowed. The button accelerates, pushing the stick left brakes, and up and down move the car between lanes — with a small speed penalty each time, so weaving is never free. Hitting another car drops your speed below that of the vehicle you struck, oil slicks send you into a skid, and the narrow bridges remove your room to dodge entirely. Everything happens quickly, and every mistake costs seconds you do not have.

There are four courses named after real circuits: Watkins Glen is the shortest, Brands Hatch adds one bridge, Le Mans two, and Monaco, the longest, three. In practice all four are straight tree-lined roads without a single corner. What separates them is length and bridge count, not shape — in 1982 the rest was left to the player's imagination, and the circuit names did a lot of heavy lifting.

The technical achievement is the scrolling. Smooth horizontal movement with several distinctly coloured cars on screen was not a given on the 2600, and Crane was one of the small group of programmers who regularly pulled more out of the machine than its specification promised. Contemporary reviews were positive, and Computer and Video Games was still awarding it 80 per cent in a retrospective as late as 1989.

It runs directly in the browser and needs one button and a direction, so getting into it takes seconds. Just know what it is: a two-minute exercise in memorising where the traffic sits. There is no career, no championship, no opponent to beat — only the previous time you set. If shaving another second off your own record does nothing for you, three attempts will be plenty. If it does, this is the kind of game that quietly eats an afternoon.