If a kid wants to drive some kind of simulated ride today, Mom or Dad go out (or order on line I suppose) and get them a computer or NinPlay or PlayTendo driving game, and they can drive, race, do whatever on their screen. Before video games, before flight simulators, we had driving simulators. This “Mutoscope Drivemobile” driving Simulator was for kids, kids of all ages. I hesitate to call it a game, but certainly an amusement/arcade item, and it certainly was good entertainment for a dime. These were placed usually in arcades according to the netwebs, although I only remember seeing these in my youth when visiting the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE).
I present to you, the 1954 International Mutoscope Drive Yourself Road Test Drivemobile Coin-Op Arcade. A long name for a fun ride. Look at that speedometer below the steering wheel. Someone will recognize that out of a classic of some kind.
My recollections of riding on these are vague from the long distant past. The always crowded Canadian National Exhibitions was the location I recall riding on these. The “Ex” always took place in the last two weeks of August annually, leading up to Labour Day. Except for Covid, that is still the schedule. The final weekend is a big attraction as that’s when the Canadian International Air Show is run. The “Ex” was always a popular day’s outing.
The object of the simulator was that you had to steer to stay in your lane while the roadway scrolled past. The roadway was painted on a rotating drum. When I first saw these photos, I had believed there was an accelerator pedal you had to press to move along, but since this is not visible in these photos, I cannot confirm this. Perhaps the ten cents fee took care of all the motion you were going to experience. There were curves in the road you had to navigate. It was not impossible, but it was a challenge to an unexperienced kid trying to drive, to stay in your lane. After all, you couldn’t really see down the road more than a dozen or two car lengths in front of you as the roadway whizzed along before your eyes.
This video shows the machine going a bit more quickly than I recall. As fast as it did go, made it that much more challenging to accumulate credits. The speed at which you were supposed to be travelling was not specified, but it was a bit quick for me, having only experienced a pedal car that may or may not have been mine, and a tricycle here and there.
This one has the optional upgraded three spoke steering wheel. A green light flashes to ensure you that you are still on the road, while a red light indicates you have gone off road. The object is to stay on the road to collect as many points as you can so you can escalate from a “creeper” to an “expert” driver.
My recollection was that the seat slid left and right to simulate motion around curves. However in researching this, it seems that the device tossed you left and right depending on the direction you steered the wheel. This made it more difficult to control.
A reseller wrote that “While you sit on the seat and steer, the seats moves in the direction you turn. The object is the stay on the road to get more points.” You were supposed to advance from Creeper, to Sleeper, to Road Hog to Back Seat Driver, all the way up to Expert, and Wizard. This would have represented an accumulation of 100 points, all in sixty seconds. There was a timer as well as the lights, which was altogether too much to take in while you were trying to watch the road. The kids crowding in on you made sure to let you know if you were not advancing. “Oh look, he really missed that turn!” The noise of the surrounding crowd made the experience more intense.
Hmm, I don’t see any semiconductors in the mechanics of these.
There was always a lineup to get on these, and they were a lot of fun.
Imagine what may possibly have been your first time behind the wheel. You get Mom or Dad to drop in the dime, and off you go. Come to the first turn, you try to move the wheel, and, the damn kids on either side of you crowding in for their turn prevented you successfully navigating that tricky curve. The lineups always meant that there were other kids crowding in on you from either side, limiting your elbow room to manoeuvre the big steering wheel. You only got a minute, one turn at a time, if the guy running it was nearby. Forget about getting a second turn, there was too big a lineup.
The advertising literature certainly used the masculine gender heavily in promoting these. “He” will learn to drive, “he” will get the feel of the road. At least they used a woman in one of their photos.
The darn thing was patented too!
This one has survived, and apparently was sold after having been listed in the $4K range. Another unit from an undated listing recently sold for $2,063 USD.
Hey lookit the neat taillights for those behind you to see. And a handy spare tire too! I hope they renewed the license plates on these annually.
Some of you might remember seeing these occasionally, if you are in the right age group. This may have been what some of us navigated as our first driving experience after a pedal car, and before driving school, or the family car out away from traffic in a parking lot or field somewhere.
These units were made in the USA with measurements five feet by two and a half wide by six and a half feet tall. As was befitting the times, there were no seat belts apparent.
Some older models are pictured here, going back to the 1940s I believe.
This is one and the same company that once produced those photo booths we used to see in malls, plazas, or department stores.
All photos sourced from the net, notably Buffalocars.com, and also ebay and wikipedia.
I am pretty sure I got some wheel time in one of these, though I recognized that they were really old by then – this was probably not later than the mid 1960s. I would have thought there was a gas pedal too, but I agree that none shows up in these photos or on the promo materials.
I remember always being surprised by how hard it was to follow the zigs and zags of the road and always disappointed at my final score. I never got more than maybe two tries at it at any given time, and because they were always when we were on some kind of outing or vacation, I never got the opportunity for practice.
That instrument panel screams 1949-53 Chrysler at me. The 1953 version below. But I would guess a fake/recreation because the one on the game seems to lack the wide space between the two upper gauges.
Interesting, I only went to the Ex once in my childhood. As a country mouse I found the whole thing rather bewildering, and slightly disappointing because my frugal Dutch parents wouldn’t spring for midway rides, unhealthy food or amazing toys.
I never saw a mutoscope but there was some sort of sit down drag racing game at the arcade when I was a teen. Many a quarter spent in that place…
Ha! They should have named the Food Building that. The “Unhealthy Food” Building.
If you had gotten over towards the Princes’ Gates, there may have been some cars to see inside. For most of my life, I thought it was the “Princess Gates,” and I seem to have only recently read it was “Princes'”.
I think the Shell Tower may have been a free ride, but then again maybe not.
I think I remember these, and being disappointed at seeing the same roadway over and over. Maybe I hadn’t entered age range, as yet. “8 to 88” is not an idiom I’ve seen before. One can imagine the discussion of whether a 7-year-old would be up to the task.
Is it possible the machine moved the roadway side to side as opposed to curves to navigate? It was certainly the same roadway over and over from what was on that drum.
’49 Chrysler for sure. I remember playing one of these. It was next to a fortune-telling “robot Gypsy” machine.
Fun post, Moparlee!
I remember a similar machine when our family went to an arcade in Cleveland Ohio, circa 1967. I remember having a turn or two on the machine, but not much about how it operated. One thing I do remember is that the speedometer was straight out of a ‘57 or ‘58 Ford. My memory leans towards ‘58 because I’m pretty sure the background for the markings was white.
Ask me how I know… 😉
Rats!
The picture of 1 1/2 year old me in a ‘57 Ford Fairlane 500 didn’t attach.
I forgot to mention that I was about 6 at the time of our arcade visit. Somewhere there photo booth pictures from that same outing.
Let me try the photo one more time…
Please try reducing the file size, or do a windows snip and save that as a photo. When I do that as a last resort, it usually works.
I copied the photo from my CC Kids post about my dad’s’57 Ford Fairlane 500. Not sure why it wouldn’t attach, unless it’s some weirdness on my phone.
One final go. Here’s a link to the photo if this attempt is unsuccessful.
https://i0.wp.com/www.curbsideclassic.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Kids-PRNDL-in-57a.jpg
Success!
Back when I was still good looking. 😉
I got to experience something like this in 1967 I believe, at the grand opening of the Sunvalley mall in Concord, CA. Kind of foggy memory as I was 7, but pretending to drive was already my #1 hobby. The one I “drove” seemed to be less elaborate than this one, but I remember my parents having to drag me away from it! Great post, Moparlee!
It seems there were a few variations of these – the one in the youtube video has a distinctly different dashboard. And the first ad flyer makes no mention of the moving seat, arguably its most impressive and advanced feature. I don’t remember seeing or playing this particular game, although I do remember several other driving or racing games of this sort.
I was a ’70s kid so I grew up during the golden age of electro-mechanical arcade games. The ones made in that decade, just before video games took over, were the most sophisticated, most elaborate, and most fun. The special effects were amazing, involving black lights, holograms, fancy film projectors, and all kinds of audio-visual illusions and electronic sound effects, and creativity of the game developers ran rampant. These machines often required frequent maintenance by skilled repair people compared to the early video games, and arcade operators were happy to get rid of them for that reason. By the early ’80s electromechanical games were all but gone from arcades, and for some reason don’t seem to have anywhere near the following (or survival rate) that vintage arcade video games do. But they were fun and wonderfully analog and three-dimensional in a way that even modern videogames aren’t. (I also think pinball lost some of its appeal around this same time when solid-state electronics replaced the clanging bells, clicking relays, and score numbers on spinning mechanical reels – but that’s a rant for another place and time).
That’s honestly so cool! I don’t know how much it really helped people learn how to drive back then, but if I could I’d buy one that works just because it reminds of some of the old arcade games I used to play.
Wow ~ I remember playing this game and also this one :
In the early 1960’s, what fun .
What I remembered was the nearly 1/4 turn of free play in the steering wheel making it nearly impossible to do very well in spite of practice .
There was a similar version that had no seat, you stood up to drive, those came in a row of four .
There was an amusement park in canandaigua lake new york that had these old machines still working .
-Nate
The video labels the machine from 1947, but it’s clearly much newer. Steering wheel mentions power steering; car evidently has automatic transmission, dash looks late ’50s or early ’60s to me (someone here will surely recognize it), and if it originally used 8-track cartridges for sound, it’s from the 1960s when they first became available.
When I was a kid we had those old World Book encyclopedias and one of them showed a room full of simulators in a driver-ed classroom, built from a ’65 or ’66 Chrysler. When I finally took my driver-ed in high school in 1981(15-1/2 years old when I could first get a learner’s permit – seems so young now) the simulators were from a ’75-76 Chevy Caprice, about 18 of them in the room, with the driver-side half of the dashboard intact (looked neat glowing in the dark room), several extra warning lights in a strip just above the dash, a seat and pedals, and a narrated film projected on the wall in the front of the classroom. If you did something wrong one of those warning lights would go on and the instructor would get a notice.
I looked online to see if driver’s-ed simulators are still a thing – they are, only now of course the projected film (which couldn’t actually respond to any student’s actions) has been replaced by an individual video screen or screens for each simulator that can respond to the driver’s actual inputs, something probably familiar to many students from video games like Gran Turismo). Not sure if they’re still fabricated from real car dashboards. I wonder when the old film-projection simulators were last used.
Very cool. This is a good driving system with an actual roadway projected onto the screen. Steering looks kind of optional here.
The display screen above shows that you will be driving a green car, but the plastic model is blue, just to confuse us even more.
Loved that Buick backing out of its spot to get in our way.
Thanks for this.
The game with the film projection had fairly tight steering along with an accelerator and brake pedals, if you put your foot down a lamp came on saying “SPEEDING” and that Buick plus the person opening the door and the woman walking out into traffic would cause a loud bell to ring if you didn’t brake quickly ~ swerving wasn’t good either .
Fun for kids .
I remember when the Los Angeles U.S.D. sold off their driving cars setups, it was very interesting,I wonder where all the units went .
-Nate
What a great webpage about the “drive yourself”. A machine I fell in love with when I was about 19 years old and this drive simulator was already an old classic. I am 58 now. I still want to one one but they are very hard to find in Europe. Maybe one day…