RoadBlasters (Cockpit) – Atari, 1987.
Now here’s a machine that didn’t just want your quarters; it wanted your dignity and a steady drip of adrenaline, delivered intravenously, one flaming fuel globule at a time. RoadBlasters wasn’t content to be a racing game. No, this was Mad Max fever-dreamed by a committee of engineers hopped up on neon and powdered Jolt Cola, then precisely rolled off the Atari assembly line to serve as both a game and a learning experience in the dangers of overestimating your hand-eye coordination.
The cockpit cabinet? Let’s talk about the cockpit: a pod-like, astronaut-wannabe exoskeleton that looked as if someone asked, “What if driving a car felt like sitting in a nuclear submarine’s command chair after four shots of Rotgut whiskey?” With a steering yoke recycled from some Cold War flight sim, joystick in one hand and a gearshift in the other, you’d wedge yourself into the seat—a sticky vinyl tomb reeking of junior-high sweat, root beer-stained carpet, and the faint hope of mechanical immortality. Half confession booth, half amusement park ride, all eighties optimism slathered in decals brighter than an episode of Miami Vice on fast-forward.
Gameplay? Imagine teaching KITT from Knight Rider to listen to the Rolling Stones and never use his turn signals. You’d scream down an endless six-lane highway, dodging Mad Max rejects in dune buggies, motorcycles, armored tanks—every one of them with a vendetta, just as homicidal as your stepdad playing Laser Tag after two Red Bulls. And if the enemy cars didn’t get you, the horizon itself did: mountains like jagged saw blades, the sky boiling orange, road signs flashing in a language only adrenaline junkies can read.
Your car wasn’t just for getting from point A to point B. No, it was your chariot and war machine, fitted with upgradable cannons, roof blasters, and the world’s most underwhelming missile system—perfect for obliterating traffic infractions and, if you’d been gifted by the gods of random power-ups, a special gun that felt like Thor’s hammer in a lunchbox. Every mile marker carried the implied threat of combustion; every extra fuel orb hung in the air like a lost promise, daring you to snatch it before your tank bone-dried at sixty miles an hour.
Atari threw in a radio announcer who’d bark “Get ready!” at you with all the warmth of a DMV clerk, just to remind you that life is fleeting and your score multiplier depends on not blinking. There was music, too, a jittery, synthetic hymn that sounded like a robot’s attempt at Queen—if Queen had decided to write an album entirely about dying in traffic.
Let’s not kid ourselves: You never finished RoadBlasters. Nobody did. Someone always claimed they “almost made it to the last stage,” but that’s arcade code for “I rage-quit when the steering wheel got slippery and blew my high score trying to eat Pizza Hut breadsticks with one hand.” Like every great sit-down arcade game, RoadBlasters was both the most fun you’d ever have and a meditation on the futility of youth. Burn bright, crash hard, blame the controls.
Here’s the thing: RoadBlasters, in that lurid, buzzing cockpit, wasn’t just about racing or shooting. It was about daring the world to throw everything at you—the baddies, the obstacles, the endless road—and smashing the accelerator anyway. A philosophical treatise disguised as a quarter-muncher, leaving you with sweaty palms, a pounding heart, and the nagging suspicion that you’d just circumnavigated the sun without ever leaving the sticky linoleum next to the change machine.
