Where did the beeping come from in Racing games?

Turns out, it’s not real. But it could be?

An interesting tweet popped up on my radar. Twitter user @KaySavetz says that his buddy Mike Albaugh invented the beeps that you hear at the beginning of many racing games.

He points out, “It’s not from actual racing.”

And I immediately went, “How did I never notice that!”

For real, if you ever watched racing events, even unofficial races like those taking place in TV shows (like The Grand Tour or Top Gear), you never really hear any kind of sound at the race’s beginning. Sometimes, there’s a set of traffic lights to say when to launch, and other times, there’s a person with a checkered flag.

But never a sound.

If he’s right, this audio cue leading up to the start of a race dates back to 1977 when the game called Drag Race was released. Here’s a video of the game in action:

I don’t know if his claim about this being the first-ever game to use the beeping before a race starts is true, but it was an interesting discovery that it doesn’t happen in real life.

“Try to imagine any beep being loud enough to hear over a couple of 500+ horsepower engines and you can readily see that there was no real-world instance of them.” — Twitter

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