Playing Night Driver while bands rocked Shakey’s

Remember Night Driver and all those nights you spent dropping quarters in the arcade machine while chomping down on slices upon slices of pizza? Well, I do, and about a dozen or more other people, remember playing video games not in the comfort of our own homes, but at the nearest Shakey’s Pizza Parlor.

I also remember that the different Shakey’s branches in this little tropical country I call home had different video arcade machines, ergo, different video games.

The most memorable, though, is Night Driver, a 1976 arcade game developed and released by Atari Inc. Its claim to fame is that it is the original first-person racing game, and is touted to be the first published video game to display real-time first-person graphics.

Like today’s generation of video racing games, Night Driver requires you, the player, to drive your car along a road at, obviously, nighttime without crashing into the sides of the road, as indicated by roadside reflectors (yeah, those dots on the side of the road are actually reflectors).

Despite its claim to fame, however, Night Driver’s car isn’t composed of bits and bytes on a computer screen but just a printed plastic insert laid under the screen. Yes, it’s the background that moves.

Alas, the ban imposed by then Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos on video games in public places put an end to that era when video games can be had while eating juicy slices of pizza (and swigging frothy mugs of beer).