You Missed Your Opportunity, Midway

Brief Synopsis: Hard Drivin' was a slow moving driving-simulator/racing game. It's best known for its framey polygon movement and complete lack of understandable goals. Is it wanting me to race against these other players or just hit the checkpoints? Why when the game says I'm going 60 miles per hour it actually feels like I'm standing still? Why does this blasted arcade cabinet hate me so much? These were some of the thoughts people had every time they attempted to play Hard Drivin', yet another failed attempt by Atari. The game was unwisely ported to both the Sega Genesis and the Atari Lynx, where nobody cared.

Missed Opportunity For the most part, each of the missed opportunities has had something to do with the genre. We talked about Smash TV and Road Blasters because they reminded us of popular games that came later. But Hard Drivin' (and its 1990 sequel, Race Drivin') is on the list because of the technology it attempted to employ. In a world full of sprite-based racing games, Atari decided that the way to go was with revolutionary 3D polygons. Albeit simple, these polygons gave the game a unique look and feel, something that Atari quickly learned was a double edge sword.

It's not that Atari was the first game company to use these 3D polygons, they certainly weren't. However, Atari definitely went further than anybody had before. What's more, Atari proved that they had the right idea; they just didn't have the expertise to pull it off ... yet. But there was still plenty of time. Had Atari stuck with this idea (as opposed to spending so much time developing failed home consoles) they may have been able to beat Sega to the punch. Sure Hard Drivin' and Race Drivin' aren't much fun, but the seeds of greatness were in there somewhere. All it would have taken was another year and some better programmers and you would have had the Virtua Racing killer. But Atari, you missed your opportunity.

Brief Synopsis: 720 Degrees was one of the earliest skateboarding games, combining huge ticks and impressive level designs. Shown from an overhead perspective, 720 Degrees emphasized racking up huge points by pushing your tricks as far as they can go. Unfortunately due to the game's limited controls this title never made it out of the 1980s, but it certainly paved the way for other skateboarding games, such as Skate or Die, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and EA's Skate series.

Missed Opportunity Maybe we should give Atari credit for trying. Skateboarding isn't exactly the easiest "sport" to recreate, especially when we're talking about in an arcade. Atari didn't have the technology to pull off what Tony Hawk's Pro Skater did 13 years later, so it shouldn't surprise anybody that 720 Degrees is a total mess. But just because your first attempt didn't work, that's no reason you should give up on the idea of making an arcade-style skateboarding game. I hear they will eventually be really popular.

There were 13 long years between 720 Degrees and Tony Hawk's impressive run, there was plenty of time to refine the core gameplay and really impress the judges. But no, Atari just gave up and decided that skateboarding wasn't worth it. And when Midway picked up the rights to the game, they too decided that skateboarding couldn't be done in a video game. Sadly they were both wrong, because Activision proved that with the right name and the right gameplay you can have one of the biggest game franchises of all time. Atari could have done this. In those 13 years they would have gotten the formula right eventually. They just didn't trust themselves to do it. They didn't even try. It's hard to fathom how different Atari's financial outlook would be had they been the company with a top selling skateboarding game every year of this last decade.

Brief Synopsis: This single player arcade game was a combination of OutRun and Spy Hunter. It featured a futuristic setting where you drove as fast as you could while shooting other vehicles out of your way. The main draw of this arcade game was the fact that you could earn power-ups that made it easier to blow up enemies in front of you and, in one case, actually drive right through your opponents as if they were invisible. Although the game did manage to make its way to at least one console (the Sega Genesis), it failed to be successful enough to warrant multiple sequels.

Missed Opportunity Road Blasters was a personal favorite when I was a kid. I especially loved being able to use a weapon so powerful that it literally allowed you to drive through the other cars. Who wouldn't want something like that in real life? And even if that's not very realistic, I would still settle for a gun turret mounted on the top of my car for those lengthy commutes. All joking aside, there's no denying that Road Blasters (which is no relation to Math Blaster) is full of great ideas. Its only sin is that it came out far too early to capitalize on the combat racing sub-genre.

In a lot of ways Road Blasters was the predecessor to games like Twisted Metal and Vigilante 8, however in tone and gameplay its has more in common with Sega's mediocre Full Auto. But let's not forget, Full Auto was a hit. In fact it was so much of a hit that it spawned a PlayStation 3 sequel mere months after its release. And that's hardly the only racing series to incorporate guns and combat. Look at the success of the wipEout series, which is known for its techno-heavy soundtrack and cool arsenal of weapons. While Road Blasters is more of a traditional road and tire kind of "racing" game, games like Full Auto and wipEout do bear quite a resemblance to this old time Atari title. All this game needed was 3D polygon graphics and a wicked multiplayer mode and it would have been the next big thing. Instead Atari opted to ignore that it even existed.

On a brief side note, Road Blasters wasn't the company's only attempt. Arcade (or Lynx) fans will remember S.T.U.N. Runner, a futuristic hovercraft racing game. This 1989 game is essentially the blueprint for the wipEout series. This game, along with the 1987 release of Road Blasters, proved that Atari was on the right path and would have eventually hit pay dirt with these combat-heavy arcade racers. But Atari never followed up on either S.T.U.N. Runner or Road Blasters, which ultimately cost them a lot of money.

Brief Synopsis: San Francisco Rush was the biggest arcade racer of the time, a competitive action game full of paint-swapping, big jumps and over-the-top antics. But of all, it was full of hidden shortcuts, which can really change the outcome of the game. The arcade game was so successful that Atari decided to port the game to the various consoles. They also followed the game up with a Nintendo 64-exclusive sequel, Rush 2: Extreme Racing USA. Arcade fans weren't left out, either. Both San Francisco Rush: The Rock and San Francisco Rush 2049 raced to the arcades (and then later to the game systems).

Missed Opportunity Of all the games listed in this article, San Francisco Rush is arguably the most popular. Sure Marble Madness had a following and everybody loves Smash TV, but it's hard to compete with the hardest, fastest, most in-your-face racing game to ever hit the arcade. San Francisco Rush took everything we loved about old school arcade-style racing games and then gave us a world full of possibilities. Beyond the over-the-top racing (which can sometimes get violent), San Francisco Rush gave us fast action on some of the best courses ever seen in a racing game. Better yet, it gave us an incentive to sabotage the other vehicles. This is a game that stuck in your head, no matter if you were a seasoned racing fan or somebody who hates the genre.

Things got even more explosive with the release of San Francisco Rush 2049. This futuristic racing game gave us new moves and more shortcuts, along with more in-your-face action. These games (along with the faux-expansion pack San Francisco Rush: The Rock) dominated the arcades, proving that if you have the right people you can put out an extraordinary game that people will want to come back to time and time again. And not just come back to, but want to buy on home consoles. This series was big.


The San Francisco Rush series predated Burnout by a full five years, plenty of times to solidify their place as THE arcade-style racing game of choice. But that's not what happened. Instead the license holders decided to wait six long years before releasing 2005's poorly received L.A. Rush. In that time Burnout had after-touched their way to victory. To add insult to injury, both L.A. Rush and the curiously titled PSP game, Rush, are set in an open world Los Angeles. A mere three years later Criterion Games unleashed Burnout Paradise and effectively killed the Rush series.

With games like 720 Degrees and Hard Drivin' it's easy to speculate that with a little more time and better technology they would have revolutionized the industry. Who knows what the future holds? It's just as likely that they would have continued to release sub-standard racing games and what they really needed was that special something that Activision and Sega brought to their projects. San Francisco Rush is different; it's not a matter of speculating. There's no question that when it came to arcade games, San Francisco Rush was at the top of their game in the late 1990s. But their inability to release a new game and the terribleness of L.A. Rush doomed the franchise. Midway is to blame here. There's no question that this series could still be as big as Burnout, but both Atari and Midway missed their opportunity. They just let it go. And that is why they are in such dire straits.