Slot Racers

Atari 2600 0 subscribers
Manual

28K plays 1978 #Action

Slot Racers is a maze game developed and published by Atari, Inc. for the Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS). The game involves the players controlling cars equipped with missiles with the goal of firing their missiles at their opponents for points. Each player earns one point for each time they hit their opponent with a missile. The first player to earn 25 points wins.

Slot Racers was designed by Warren Robinett and was the first game he designed for Atari. The game was developed under the name Traffic and was influenced by Atari's earlier game Combat (1977). He initially wanted to include roving police cars in the maze but was unable to add this to the game at the time. The game was released in October 1978. A review in Video of the game in 1981 declared it "the most important of the classic labyrinth games." Howard J. Blumenthal of The Complete Guide to Electronic Games (1981) found its gameplay inferior to tank-themed games of the era.

Writing for AllGame, Brett Weiss echoed Blumenthal's comments saying that Slot Racers was the inferior game and critiqued its lack of a single-player mode and simplistic graphics. Kevin Bunch found it to be a decent, if not classic, early Atari game, noting that it was an ambitious game from a first-time developer that expanded on the gameplay of earlier maze games such as The Amazing Maze Game (1976). Robinett felt the game was merely okay and on its completion began developing his next game, which would become Adventure (1980).

From Wikipedia's article Slot Racers, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Keyboard controls

Atari 2600Player 1Player 2
D-pad↑↓←→IKJL
FireZN
Game SelectShift
Game ResetEnter

Hotkeys

  • 1 Quick save state
  • 2 Quick load state
  • 3 Change save slot

Most games start with Game Reset. Paddle games (Breakout, Kaboom!…) need a gamepad stick.

Gamepads are detected when you press a button. Remap any key from the emulator’s Controls menu (gear icon).

Emulator help & troubleshooting

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Keyboard controls

Atari 2600Player 1Player 2
D-pad↑↓←→IKJL
FireZN
Game SelectShift
Game ResetEnter

Hotkeys

  • 1 Quick save state
  • 2 Quick load state
  • 3 Change save slot

Most games start with Game Reset. Paddle games (Breakout, Kaboom!…) need a gamepad stick.

Gamepads are detected when you press a button. Remap any key from the emulator’s Controls menu (gear icon).

Emulator help & troubleshooting

Videos

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Pixel Verdict

Slot RacersAtari 2600

1.5 Wake me up when it's over

Critics 47 · 3 reviews

What the reviews talk about

Key wordssimplisticboring

What the critics said

  • Writing for AllGame, Brett Weiss echoed Blumenthal's comments saying that Slot Racers was "little more than a maze variation on the Combat theme, and a not very good one."

    — AllGame

From the Reception section of Wikipedia's Slot Racers article, under CC BY-SA 4.0. The words are the critics'; their full reviews are on the publishers' pages.

Scores

  • AllGame 1.5/5
  • The Complete Guide to Electronic Games 2/5
  • Electronic Games 1983 Software Encyclopedia 7/10

From the review table of Wikipedia's article. The face takes, first that applies: the Metascore for this platform, GameRankings' archived average, our average of the critics (one number per publication, a panel averaged), one review alone, the players' rating. Critics and players are never mixed.

Players' rating: 81/100 · 14 votes

Full reviews

Face key

  1. 1.00+
  2. 1.540+
  3. 2.050+
  4. 2.560+
  5. 3.068+
  6. 3.575+
  7. 4.080+
  8. 4.585+
  9. 5.090+

5.0 Outstanding! · 4.0 Great job! · 3.0 Good job · 2.0 Could be better · 1.0 Wake me up when it's over · A thumbs-up adds half a point. Our own drawings, in the spirit of the faces GamePro magazine used in the '90s.

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