Title: Hi Way (Atari)
Year: 1976
Cockpit (sometimes called sit-in or environmental) arcade cabinets represented a veritable mountaintop for me when I was growing up. The fixed-position steering wheel (always completely free rotating, like it was greased in zero-gravity butter with hardly any resistance) was so fake but so real.
The positioning of the sitting player meant that the screen was largely opened up to everyone else in the arcade, making it one of those experiences where you better play well or risk the agony of a public defeat. The cockpit games were always more expensive, too ($.50 to a normal game’s $.25), creating an incremental layer of pressure.
