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RighteousBlaze· September 2026
BoughtNinja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge
Pole Position
- $21.99
- Regular price
-
$25.99 - Sale price
- $21.99
- Unit price
- per
Box, manual and game — all original, all in the photos. Game condition guide →
Ships in 1–2 business days·Tracking on every order·Signature required on orders $250+
Item Condition
Complete in box: the cartridge, the manual and the box, all original; anything beyond that is included only if you can see it in the photos. For the specifics, look to the photos — they're of this exact item. Every cartridge's shell, label and board are checked for authenticity when it comes into the store, and it's tested before it's listed. It ships in a collector's bag or a hard plastic case.
Item Description
“Prepare to qualify.” That voice from the arcade cabinet introduced a generation of players to what a racing game was supposed to be. Namco's 1982 Pole Position put the camera behind the car, modeled its circuit on Japan's Fuji Speedway and made you earn your grid spot with a timed qualifying lap before the real race began. Atari brought it to American arcades, where it became one of the biggest hits of its day, and the template it set, from the chase camera to the checkpoint clock, shaped racing games for decades.
The Atari 5200 version, programmed by Mike Horowitz and Betty Ryan Tylko at General Computer Corporation for Atari in 1983, keeps the essentials. You still qualify first: a lap of 73 seconds or better gets you into the race, and 58.5 seconds or less wins the pole and a big bonus. Then the field fills in and the clock becomes your real opponent, with extra time awarded for laps you finish fast enough. There is a no-traffic practice run plus three races, the Malibu Grand Prix, Namco Speedway and Atari Grand Prix, each busier than the last, and you can set anywhere from one to eight laps.
Control is where the 5200 earns its keep. The analog joystick gives you graduated steering that comes far closer to the arcade wheel than a standard eight-way stick could, while separate buttons handle the gas and brake and a push up or down shifts between high and low gear. Passing cars roar by with convincing engine sounds as you thread the pack. The arcade's scaling effects and roadside billboards were beyond the hardware, but the speed and the tension of threading through traffic come through.
Racing games as we know them start here, and with analog steering and separate gas and brake buttons, the 5200 cartridge is a satisfying way to play it on hardware from its own era.
Fast factsgame data via IGDB
- Released
- 1982
- Publisher
- GCE
- Developer
- Namco
- Players
- Single player
About the game
The very first racing game with the rear perspective camera and track based on real life.
Summary from the IGDB community database — the condition and contents of this listing are described above and in the photos.Watch gameplayPole Position on Atari 5200
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Atari 5200
Pole Position
$21.99
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Atari 5200
Pole Position
$21.99
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