Gran Trak 10

Player drops in his quarter, hits the starter, grabs the wheel and-he's off! Four-speed gear shift (1, 2, 3, R) changes speed of the car on the screen and the sound of the engine. Foot pedals for gas and brake demand quick reactions around the road-race curves. Watch out for the oil slick! Your brakes lock momentarily and you skid. It takes lots and lots of pratice runs. At two bits a run.

Released in March 1974, selling at an MSRP of $1095.

Gran Track 10 was one of the first driving video game and IS the first game to use ROM memory.

The Trak series took an inventive approach to combating pirates. When Atari assigned a part number to the custom-designed ROMs for the game, they gave it the same number as a Texas Instruments Arithmetic Logic Unit so that when pirates tried to build their own version, they'd order the wrong part and their clones wouldn't work.

Atari's new Grass Valley think Tank was used to design the game, but Atari proper was disappointed by engineering flaws in the original design. Al Alcorn had to step in and fix the game before it went into production. This fix created costly rework and delays for the game. Worse, an accounting error had Gran Trak 10 selling for $995, when it cost $1095 to manufacture. Because of these problems, Atari lost $500,000 on Gran Trak 10, which was as much as the company had made the previous year. The European version of the game was called: "Race Circuit Automaten". The game was advertised as "Durastress" and marketed with Atari's Innovative leisure slogan.

Becoro # 2023-09-26 07:04:52 - source

display: Monotone

Top-down arcade racer, first ever computer game to use a steering wheel and pedals.

# 2001-11-10 01:24:07 - 1 reply

has this clone
Formula K (Arcade)

prequel of
Gran Trak 20 (Arcade)
LeMans (Arcade)

similar to
Trak 10 (Arcade)
Pace Car Pro (Arcade)

has influenced (old)
Race! (Arcade)