What was the first video game to use a steering wheel?
The early days of arcade gaming were spent getting used to the idea that you could control things on a screen with a paddle or joystick. Pong had people bouncing a square ball back and forth, and early games like Computer Space required you to master a handful of buttons just to make your spaceship move around. Which game became the first to let players grip an actual steering wheel?
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Correct Answer: Gran Trak 10
(Source)Atari's Gran Trak 10 rolled into arcades in 1974, complete with a steering wheel, gear shifter, and separate accelerator and brake pedals. Nolan Bushnell and his team over at Atari basically crammed a simplified car dashboard into an arcade cabinet. The game lasted exactly 90 seconds per quarter, although most players would've loved a first-try freebie to figure out how to avoid crashing into walls before actually playing. The steering wheel setup became the template for practically every racing game that followed, though Atari learned the hard way that building all those custom controls was incredibly expensive.
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