#027 - Drag: Perfect Shift, or Blown Engine?

Release Date: October, 1973

Platform: Mainframe (BASIC type-in)

Genre: Racing, Simulation

Developer(s): N/A

Publisher(s): Creative Computing Software

Here in Australia, one of our TV broadcasters airs a weekly show called Speedweek. Like its name suggests, it's a weekly motorsport wrap-up, covering all sorts of Australian racing competitions, from track racing, to motocross, to even speedboats. I used to love checking in on it every weekend, and one of the sections I most looked forward to was the drag racing. These insane, purpose built monsters with tyres taller than a person that spat flames everywhere and needed parachutes to help them stop, were awe-inspiring to me as a child. I don't keep up with it now (heck, my house doesn't even have a TV signal,) but I remember those days fondly. That, the V8 Supercars and Top Gear spurned a keen interest in cars and motorsport in me.

And then there was the video games. Naturally, racing games have historically been one of my favourite genres, growing up with the early and Black Box-era Need for Speed games, as well as Project Gotham Racing, Gran Turismo and Forza Motorsport. Need for Speed Underground 2 currently sits on my personal top 10 games of all time list. It's not quite my favourite genre (that would be RPGs) but, I still love racing games, and I'm excited to see the earliest racing games in action.

One such racing game is today's topic. Drag is a text game based on those awe-inspiring Top Fuel and Funny Car drag racing machines. It's not the first racing game - that title probably goes to the lost Can-Am from 1972 - but it's an example of what early game developers were thinking and wanting to do with a genre like racing, which was hardly a genre at all in 1973. Sure, Space Race technically counts as a "racing" game, but it's a very different kind of racing game.

Sadly, there's very little information on Drag available. We don't even have an author. All we know on its background comes from More BASIC Computer Games, which tells us that Drag was sourced from the Hewlett-Packard User Library. The October '73 date of publication comes from the game's Sol-20 source code. Creative Computing's code in More BASIC Games edits the date part out. 

More BASIC Computer Games.

Also, it's time to debut a new resource in this article: Creative Computing Magazine. As I'm sure I've mentioned somewhere along the line, Creative Computing is the company David Ahl founded after leaving DEC. CC's magazine first appeared in October 1974, and ran until the end of 1985. I know I'm not into 1974 coverage yet, but it's relevant to bring this up now, as Drag appears in the Jan '77 issue of CC magazine. It still has no author attached to it, but it retains the unmodified source code. I find it funny that they call it a "new game," despite being 4 years old at its time of inclusion. That's an eternity in video game years; some home consoles don't even last that long.

Apparently we're drag racing in the 1900s.

The Creative Computing Magazine archive can be found here. It'll also be in the Recommended Resources page from now on, under the Books & Magazines heading.

And that's it. Yeah, that's all the information we've got. 

Drag not only has you race a dragster, but you also get to design several aspects of your machine. Horsepower, rear end ratio, tyre width and tyre diameter are the available metrics, and there's no limits to them. As Creative Computing's articles say, you can create a dragster with 2 million horsepower, but in practice it won't work. The engine you'd need to generate that much power would be massive! They also say that the computer opponent is quite hard to beat... 

Now, it's probably fine to jump into Drag thinking of the kind of top fuel drag racing of today, where specially made cars can generate thousands of horsepower. Top fuel was active in 1973, but I'm not sure it was quite at the same power levels that 2025 reaches. Looking at the example game provided in More BASIC Computer Games, it selects 790 horsepower. The magazine only does 370hp. For reference, the fastest production cars of the day capped out in the high 300s/low 400s in horsepower. No Bugatti Veyrons around in those days.

All that is to say that I wasn't sure on how to approach designing a dragster for this game. I honestly don't know anything about what makes a good dragster - I like cars and motorsport, but I know very little of the mechanics behind it. 

Rookie dragster on the scene here. Go easy on me.

After the game gave me the run down of instructions, and I asked to play the computer (you can choose to play against another person,) we come to designing the beast. I chose to base my stats somewhat off of what's in the book and magazine for my first run. I went with what I thought was a conservative 500hp, went with a rear-end ratio of 5:1, tyre width of 18 inches, and tyre diameter of 2.8 feet.

The very cluttered table suggests I'm behind. I have more rubber, though.

And then, we let the car loose. With the way my DOSBox settings were, the game took a while to calculate the results. The computer's car (#1) stopped "burning rubber" first, with mine (#2) taking a couple more seconds to stop. However, I was slower over the few seconds of the race, so despite that, I still lost by about 35 feet.

Not enough, however.

Now comes the fun part of figuring out what I need to adjust to make the car faster. My thoughts were that the approach needed is to adjust the stats one at a time and compare results after each run. Horsepower was probably fine as is, so I started adjustments with the rear end ratio. I also turned up the cycle speed slightly in DOSBox to try and speed things along a little.

I tried upping the rear end ratio to 5.5 first. At first, there was no difference at all, but at the very end of the race, I ended up with slightly worse results. I reverted it back to 5 and try changing tire width instead. I upped the width to 20 inches, and this provided a marginal improvement in speed. Must be worth trying again, right? I tried 22 inches for the next round.

Getting closer...

This results in another small improvement! The two tyre adjustments have so far resulted in closing the gap by about 10 feet. Probably best to keep pushing it until increasing tire width stops having benefits.

The increases starting becoming more negligible the further I pushed tyre width. I stopped at 26 inches, as my later speed was beginning to decrease. The gap had closed to 20 feet by this time. 

The next aspect to look at was tyre diameter. First I'd look at increasing it to 3 feet, and see what that did. This got me another little step closer, but the noticeable change here was that my car stopped burning rubber a second earlier.

These settings got me over 1300ft for the first time.

Changing the diameter more produced interesting results. At 3.2 feet, I was closer to matching the computer's speed, but I stopped burning rubber at the same time as him, and ended up being a little further behind at the end. 

I decided to revert back to 3 feet for diameter, and starting working on horsepower instead. Upping it to 550hp got me the closest I'd been so far, only 11 feet off the pace. More power! 600hp improved again, but only minimally. Worth trying more power, regardless, but my guess at this point that the tyres would need to be changed to accommodate more power. Upgrading to 650hp has my car stop burning rubber at the same point as the computer again, and I had a worse finish. Back to tyres.

Getting even closer...

The combination that got me really close was tuning down to 630hp, and upping tyre width to 30 inches. It put me neck-and-neck with the computer up until the end, where I faltered a little more than previously. I thought horsepower might need more tweaking.

And it did... but a whole lot else needed tweaking, too. I spent a fair bit of time tinkering with settings. At first, I thought wider tires was the solution. To a point, it was. They'd get me off the line faster, but the car would lose speed faster as the tyres burnt out earlier and earlier. I tried messing with the rear end ratio, but I definitely fluked out on getting it right straight away. Any adjustments away from 5 just made things worse. Tyre diameter can't go any larger than 3.4, else the tyres burn out immediately.

Nope.

Eventually, after at least a couple of hours of tweaking, I did it. What led to the breakthrough was something that, on the surface, seemed counter intuitive - narrower tyres. While wider tyres built up more speed at the start, they lost more speed at the back end of the race. Narrower tyres don't pick up speed as quickly, but they're better at maintaining speed through the race. 28 inches ended up being the magic number. I also discovered that pairing narrower tires with the maximum tyre diameter of 3.4 worked the best.

A winner is me...???

With those numbers locked in, it was just a matter of getting the horsepower right. One of my better earlier attempts started at 650hp, so that's where I started. Increasing by 5hp each run, my times improved up until 665hp, where the game declared me the winner! But, it didn't feel quite right. The computer hit 1320 ft, and 665hp with all those other settings only got me to 1319.957. I wasn't sure if the game was right. I needed to see that 1320 number, so I kept going. 

664hp. Time: 1320.001

Done. I did it. Boy, that felt satisfying. I punched the air a few times when I saw the 1320 come up. After inching closer and closer towards it over the previous hour, one can imagine the excitement of finally nailing it.

Photo finish!

There wasn't really much else to do in the game, now that I'd achieved what I wanted. With all the post-race interviews and trophy presentations done, it's now time to reflect on the race.

Time Played: 3 hours

A lot of this time is admittedly bloat, coming from how slowly I ran the game in DOSBox.

Difficulty: 7 (Hard)

Drag demands precision in order to win, and the settings to win aren't immediately obvious, resulting in a lot of experimenting and trial & error.

Gameplay: 9

Drag plays most similarly to Lunar, I find. Both are really dependent on trial & error to achieve the precise winning settings, almost like a puzzle game. Drag is better executed, as the results from the player's incremental changes are more perceivable, making it easier to tell what's working and what isn't. So, when victory comes, it feels more earned and satisfying than with something like Lunar.

As an aside, some weird stuff is going on with the Archive's ports of this game. The online versions seem to use different calculations than the downloaded ones. My winning setup only got to 1315 ft there, but passed 1320 ft on both the classic.exe and classic.qb64 downloads. It still registered it as a win, but the inconsistency is concerning. Not the game's fault, mind you.  

Controls: 5

Pretty standard for a text-based game.

Visual: 2

Here's where things get really weird for Drag. CC's book and magazine show what Drag is supposed to look like, with a relatively neatly-formatted table. However, the ports on the Archive don't all follow suit. The DOSBox port I played completely ruins the table with excessively large numbers, but loading the game online presents the game without issue (different calculations notwithstanding.) I'm basing my score on what the game is meant to look like. The instructions need better spacing, but the table is decent, although it is hard to tell who the winner is because the large numbers rear their ugly heads at the end of the table, regardless of version. 

Functionality: 5

No problems over multiple hours of gameplay.

Accessibility: 2

I think Drag assumes a level of knowledge about drag racing. This can make it a bit off-putting if you're coming in without any understanding, like I was. That being said, it's relatively easy to approach after getting over the initial apprehension.

Fun Factor: 11

I really enjoyed this. I didn't get overly frustrated like I did with Lunar. The win felt tough, but achievable, and I was immensely satisfied after tuning my dragster just right to break that 1320 ft mark. 

However, there's not really any draw to returning back to Drag once it's won. It's like a puzzle game with one solution - once that solution is found, what reason is there to return for a second go? I doubt there's many different winning setups. Still, for a "one-and-done" sort of game, Drag does it very well.

Drag doesn't quite get the perfect shift, registering a score of 34, which is still respectable for the time period we're in. In fact, this puts it at fifth overall in the Tier List for now, despite only being in the D-tier. Definitely a standout game for me, and it's a real shame that it seems to have been significantly overlooked.

We're taking our winnings from the drag strip back to the casino, but not before sidestepping into a questionable game of tag.

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