Important New Theory About Car Identities In An Ancient Video Game: Cold Start

I understand that you come here for only the most important and relevant automotive news and insights, and if there’s something more relevant and important than a 45 year old video game, then I sure as hell don’t know what it is. The game in question is the Atari 2600 version of Night Driver, and I think I finally have some answers regarding this game’s, let’s say, impressionistic visuals.

The history of the game is interesting too, because I believe it (in its original arcade form) is a direct descendent of the original first-person driving game, a German game called Nürburgring from 1976, which, even more significantly, can trace its origins to a driving simulator used by Volkswagen in 1972. I wrote about that before and will likely re-visit it again here, but for now I just wanted to give some history. Besides, we’re talking about the home version here, from 1978, for the Atari VCS/2600.

I’ve written about Night Driver a bit before, but about the cars on the artwork used on the sticker on the cartridge, which you can see on the left here:

I’ve already identified the Porsche 935 slantnose and BMW 3.0 CSL on that sticker, but today I want to try and identify the cars that actually appear in the game itself, which you can see legendary racer Mario Andretti playing in this old commercial, along with Pelé and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar:

Here’s a better shot of the game’s graphics:

What I’d like to try to do is identify the cars here, again, because it’s important, dammit.

The player’s “car,” that blue shape in the lower center, is usually considered to be a crude representation of an open-wheel race car, but given the public road setting of the game, I always found that sort of improbable. I have another theory:

It’s a hood ornament! And not just any hood ornament – an International Harvester hood ornament, the sort that would be on a truck or school bus, or some similar sort of large IH vehicle. The perspective on the oncoming car also seems to suggest a high ride height for the player, again suggesting some sort of large truck, the type IH makes. I think what we’re seeing there is an International Harvester hood ornament on the hood of a big-ass truck.

What about the oncoming car sprite; it’s pretty crude, an 8×8 pixel sprite that gets scaled up as it approaches you, but there’s a surprising amount of detail in those 42 illuminated pixels out of that grid of 64.

The shape of the car is somewhat unusual, and reminds me of this:

A Citroën Karin, maybe? It has the dramatic slope and horizontal, yellow headlamps, though it is sort of strange all the cars on that dark country road are French concept cars. It could be a more tame French concept, too, maybe the Citroën BX concept:

I’ve colored this one to match the game sprite, but you get the idea. There’s plenty of similar late ’70s cars that could fit this, too, but I was enjoying the exotic Citroën angle.

The car sprite seems to include the silhouette of a driver, which is interesting. A very wide-shouldered driver.

So, perhaps Night Driver was a game about a person driving an International Harvester full-size truck down a dark, winding road, populated only by exotic French concept cars.

That’s a hell of a game, right?