Sebring © 1979 Atari.
A black & white driving game.
It was a sitdown game with a curved projection mirror. The monitor was mounted on top of the cabinet. The cabinet was designed by the Cabinet Department.
Sebring was developed in early 1979, ostensibly to use up a supply of 25 inches color monitors.
It was a first person game, using the stamp hardware that was used back then.
The game designer/programmer was Owen Rubin, one of the great early game designers. Owen came up with several innovations that were copied by later generations of driving games :
1. The player drove around a circular track; the hardware made it look like the objects that were farther away were smaller.
2. The player saw the front of his own car, which shook as the car was driven.
3. There were other cars on the track which the player had to get around.
4. The player started the game by starting the engine, which started with a bang, a hardware bug that the designers liked, so they kept it in.
The Hardware Engineer was Jed Margolin. Paul Mancuso was the tech. That was the entire team, aided only by Karen Bjorquist (assembler).
Paul and Jed put a large speaker in the front of the seat, between the player's legs which gave the player a nice buzz from the engine sound. Years later, this feature was used by others, who patented it.
Although Sebring did very well in field test, it was cancelled because, supposedly, the vender who made Atari's cabinets didn't want to make it (Perhaps he wanted too much money).
Designed and programmed by : Owen Rubin
Hardware by : Jed Margolin, Paul Mancuso
Assembler : Karen Bjorquist
Machine's picture.