Indy Turbo

From Roger Hector: "I managed the Advanced Products Group that worked across all areas of the company, from Coin-Op to the Consumer division.  I remember building the first large projection screen coin-op racing simulator.  It was called Indy Turbo (the early name for it was "Indy Racer"), and it actually looked like a Formula 1 race car with a big projection screen in front of the driver. 

I led the design along with Harry Jenkins.  Harry was a very creative mechanical engineer, and we made a good team.  We had this very special "hot rod" video projector given to us by the manufacturer for evaluation in R&D.  It was an early (Electro-Home?) water-cooled video projector (Ed.: Jeff Anderson of Videotopia had some information about the projector - "It's an Electrohome EDP-58.  They were in production for at least a couple years, and used a single green Sony SD187 CRT.  It was designed as a "data" projector, to be hooked up to computers like the Apple II.").  We couldn't let it just sit around, so we built it into a special beefed-up race car body and put an old game (Night Driver) into it, projected onto a five-foot screen, just to see what it would do in the field.  It looked pretty cool as it resembled a real formula racing car and it had a special seat that leaned into the turns as you drove.  The player’s seat was rigged to rock a couple inches tied to steering wheel inputs, and this physical movement during play would add to the sense of being in a moving/leaning car (not sitting on a fixed bench).  We used a whole racing car (front to back) and mounted the video projector behind the driver and projected it over his head onto a larger projection screen mounted over the front axle of the car.   

Before going out in public, we wanted to make sure it would hold up to abuse, so we called on the biggest guy in Engineering, Dave Stubin, to check it out for durability.  We presented our beautiful shiny new race car to him, confident its construction was worthy, and he promptly raised his foot and stomped it on our car, breaking the gas cap off, and breaking our hearts!  Now, Dave was a really BIG guy, and this became known as "The Stubin Test".  It was pretty useful for making sure coin doors and controllers would hold up in the field.

After some further rebuilding, Indy Turbo went out on location in a local arcade and amazingly (despite having an old low-tech game in it) became an instant hit and the all-time top earning coin game at this local amusement park.  The unique cabinet design is what really drew in the players, as it looked like a complete race car, and not just a box, screen, and steering wheel.  But it was using a prototype video projector that never went into production, so we could never produce it.  We would not have used it past our prototype Indy Turbo anyway, as it was pretty fragile and would not have held up well in a real commercial coin-op location.

Here's some photos of the prototype out in our parking lot:"