Racing Games
The year zero for racing on a screen is 1974. Atari's Gran Trak 10 had a wheel, an accelerator, a brake and a gear shift, and is credited as the first driving video game with a steering wheel (mechanical driving amusements came earlier, so it is not the first racing game). The same year, Taito's Speed Race was made by Tomohiro Nishikado — the man who, four years later, made Space Invaders. The hand that designed a racing game's vertical scroll went on to create Japanese shooting games. In 1981 Sega's Turbo opened the view from behind your own car, and in 1982 Namco's Pole Position made the real circuit and the qualifying lap into a form. For Out Run (1986), Yu Suzuki toured Europe for about two weeks first, and the result became the high-water mark of the moving-seat cabinet. At home, F-ZERO (1990) went to pseudo-3D speed and Super Mario Kart (1992) introduced the invention of items that let whoever is losing turn it around. Ridge Racer (1993) became the face of the PlayStation, and in 1997 Gran Turismo's Kazunori Yamauchi said he wanted “a game that does not waste your life,” steering it toward driving technique and car culture. And then this current leaves games altogether: Jann Mardenborough, a graduate of GT Academy, became a real racing driver and finished third in the LMP2 class at Le Mans. A road on which a wheel inside a screen reached a real one.
The myth, corrected
Pole Position was the first racing game to show your car from behind.
Sega's Turbo (October 1981) came a year earlier, and Sega's own product page for it is still online: you drove in third person, seen from behind your own car. What Pole Position (1982) invented was not the viewpoint but the procedure of a race — a real circuit and a qualifying session.