Sprintmaster Review

In 1984, the video game industry experienced a crash, the result of which was that the Atari 2600 very nearly died. Yet, somehow, out of the rubble, Atari managed to continue making some viable profit from the system to the extent that, as late as 1990, Atari was producing new games for the system. One of the later games to be produced for the Atari 2600 was 1988’s Sprintmaster, a racing game. Is this game any good? Allow me to answer that question.

The concept of Sprintmaster is simple. You have two cars on a track and they race around it for a set number of laps. But there’s much more to it than that. First and foremost, you have your choice of whether you want to play with one player or two, and you also have your choice of whether you want your car to bounce or crash when it hits a wall (crashes take longer to recover from). After this, you choose a number of laps. You can choose anything from one to fifty. These choices are actually made on the title screen rather than by using the difficulty switches as you would have to do with most earlier Atari 2600 games.

After you have made your choices on the title screen, you proceed to a course selection screen. All of the courses appear fully on one screen, without any screen scrolling, but there are nine different courses to choose from ranging in difficulty from quite easy to quite difficult. Does this sound like a lot of options for an Atari 2600 game? It gets better. After you have chosen your course, you can choose your terrain between blacktop, dirt, and ice, and your choice actually impacts the handling of the cars on the track. Your car will slip on the ice terrain, for example. This is all a lot of options to pack into one Atari 2600 game.

Controlling the game during the actual race is quite simple as well. You accelerate with the button and turn with the joystick. Turning is relative to the direction your car is going however, so if you want your car to turn to its right, you hit right. This is the norm for racing game of this type in this period though. The courses will also have traction pickups that improve your cars traction and strips that slow your car down that you’ll need to avoid. The view of the races is top-down, and you can see such things as time spent in the race and what lap you’re on on a display above the course. So this game is fun as well as being options-loaded.

Aesthetically, the game looks pretty good. The course will be appropriately-colored for the type of terrain you chose. The cars are animated with small pixels by Atari 2600 standards. The game even has a title screen, something which was more common by 1988, but its presence is still something not seen in most Atari 2600 games. The sound effects of the cars moving and crashing are fairly realistic as well as the sound of the countdown to the beginning of the race. In general, the sound effects just sound good and appropriate.

If you are a fan of the Atari 2600 and are a fan of racing games, this is probably a game that you should try to find. As it was one of the later releases, it isn’t quite as common as some of the system’s biggest hits, but it isn’t overly rare either. Sprintmaster is an example of just how many options for gameplay the Atari 2600 was capable of delivering in a single game, and for that it is to be commended.