Slot Racers

Slot Racers
Box art by John Enright
Developer	Atari, Inc.
Publishers	Atari, Inc.
Designer	Warren Robinett
Platform	Atari 2600
Release	October 1978
Genre	Maze
Mode	Multiplayer

Slot Racers is a maze game developed and published by Atari, Inc. for the Atari Video Computer System (Atari VCS). The game involves the players controlling cars equipped with missiles with the goal of firing their missiles at their opponents for points. Each player earns one point for each time they hit their opponent with a missile. The first player to earn 25 points wins.

Slot Racers was designed by Warren Robinett and was the first game he designed for Atari. The game was developed under the name Traffic and was influenced by Atari's earlier game Combat (1977). He initially wanted to include roving police cars in the maze but was unable to add this to the game at the time. The game was released in October 1978. A review in Video of the game in 1981 declared it "the most important of the classic labyrinth games." Howard J. Blumenthal of The Complete Guide to Electronic Games (1981) found its gameplay inferior to tank-themed games of the era.

Writing for AllGame, Brett Weiss echoed Blumenthal's comments saying that Slot Racers was the inferior game and critiqued its lack of a single-player mode and simplistic graphics. Kevin Bunch found it to be a decent, if not classic, early Atari game, noting that it was an ambitious game from a first-time developer that expanded on the gameplay of earlier maze games such as The Amazing Maze Game (1976). Robinett felt the game was merely okay and on its completion began developing his next game, which would become Adventure (1980).