Game Review

More racing? Yep! Grand Prix was released by Activision for the Atari 2600 in 1982. While Activision titles were generally very high quality with a lot of visual polish, this is one of their more middle of the road titles (hah!). Visually, it does live up to Activision standards; numerous moving objects on the screen that are each multi-colored (not an easy feat on this system), no flickering, and smooth animation and scrolling make this title look quite impressive by 1982 Atari 2600 standards. Unfortunately, the gameplay is overall average. The goal is to race from start to finish in the shortest time possible; crashing into other cars or obstacles will slow you down costing time. And that's pretty much all there is to it; no additional levels or races can be reached, nor does difficulty increase over time, or any similar mechanism to extend gameplay beyond the set time limit. Perhaps this is an attempt to make this game less “video-gamey” and more like real racing or just resulted from the extreme hardware limitations, but overall that made the title one I didn't find as interesting to stick with. Just racing for a better time isn't super exciting, an issue some other Activision games from the era also had. There isn't much included for game variations as many 2600 titles had back then, but it does have a few difficulty levels available which affect the obstacles on screen and length of the course.