I know, I know. I’m supposed to say iPod’s click wheel, or the Western Electric 500 rotary dial, or maybe the first Nest.

But, have you ever played Super Sprint?

It was Super Sprint that had the first amazing rotary controller I’ve ever used, and the whole cabinet design told you the game was very well aware of that.

Super Sprint was a 1986 arcade game from Atari that was, in a nutshell: four cars (at least one computer-controlled), eight tracks, fast races.

You might think that those wheels functioned similarly to a regular car steering wheel, but not really – they were much easier to spin, and needed to travel further to rotate the car. You wouldn’t steer delicately, but rather the opposite: you needed to throw the wheel violently in one direction, and then, at the perfect moment, stop it on a dime:

So the huge wheels were not realistic. Neither were the cars. They accelerated rapidly – the gas pedal was your only other control – and had a ridiculous amount of understeer.

Don’t let the size and intensity of the interface fool you, though: this was a very precise operation. The game was tight – Rollercoaster Tycoon tight or Excel 97 tight, a whole decade before them. In the world awash with slow computers, Super Sprint lived up to its name, laughing latency and delays in their faces. It’s hard for me, even today, to imagine something faster or tighter – and for even my contemporary work, it’s good to remember things can feel this way. And, on top of all that? Better-than-usual sound design, higher-than-usual resolution, shortcuts to reward really good players, and a bunch of great details and easter eggs.

Super Sprint wasn’t Atari’s first attempt here – it was preceded by Sprint 2, Sprint 4, Sprint 8, and Sprint One – and you could tell. It was designed and coded by Kelly Turner and Robert Weatherby, polished as hell, and might have been the first interface between the person, the hardware, and the software that really inspired me. It was almost as much fun to watch three good players compete, as it was to play yourself. But when I played it, it’s possible these were my first – please excuse me here – motor memories.

Atari used the same wheel for other games, famous and obscure, but this was where it met its match in software. I can show that to you, but experiencing it is impossible from afar. Even perfect emulation can’t do it justice – there has simply never been a home controller that approached it. (I mean, the whole cabinet weighed 400 pounds!)

But if you are ever in an old-school-themed arcade, look out for Super Sprint (locations), or its two-player cousin Championship Sprint (locations) – and give it a turn or two.

Half of my education in URLs as user interface came from Flickr in the late 2000s. Its URLs looked like this:

flickr.com/photos/mwichary/favorites
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/54896695834/in/set-72177720330077904

This was incredible and a breath of fresh air. No redundant www. in front or awkward .php at the end. No parameters with their unpleasant ?&= syntax. No % signs partying with hex codes. When you shared these URLs with others, you didn’t have to retouch or delete anything. When Chrome’s address bar started autocompleting them, you knew exactly where you were going.

This might seem silly. The user interface of URLs? Who types in or edits URLs by hand? But keyboards are still the most efficient entry device. If a place you’re going is where you’ve already been, typing a few letters might get you there much faster than waiting for pages to load, clicking, and so on. It might get you there even faster than sifting through bookmarks. Or, if where you’re going is up in hierarchy, well-designed URL will allow you to drag to select and then backspace a few things from the end.

Flickr allowed to do all that, and all without a touch of a Shift key, too.

Any URL being easily editable required for it to be easily readable, too. Flickr’s were. The link names were so simple that seeing the menu…

…told you exactly what the URLs for each item were.

In the years since, the rich text dreams didn’t materialize. We’ve continued to see and use naked URLs everywhere. And this is where we get to one other benefit of Flickr URLs: they were short. They could be placed in an email or in Markdown. Scratch that, they could be placed in a sentence. And they would never get truncated today on Slack with that frustrating middle ellipsis (which occasionally leads to someone copying the shortened and now-malformed URL and sharing it further!).

It was a beautiful and predictable scheme. Once you knew how it worked, you could guess other URLs. If I were typing an email or authoring a blog post and I happened to have a link to your photo in Flickr, I could also easily include a link to your Flickr homepage just by editing the URL, without having to jump back to the browser to verify.

Flickr is still around and most of the URLs above will work. In 2026, I can think of a few improvements. I would get rid of /photos, since Flickr is already about photos. I would also try to add a human-readable slug at the end, because…
flickr.com/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904-alishan-forest-railway
…feels easier to recall than…
flickr.com/photos/mwichary/sets/72177720330077904

(Alternatively, I would consider getting rid of numerical ids altogether and relying on name alone. Internet Archive does it at e.g. archive.org/details/leroy-lettering-sets, but that has some serious limitations that are not hard to imagine.)

But this is the benefit of hindsight and the benefit of things I learned since. And I started learning and caring right here, with Flickr, in 2007. Back then, by default, URLs would look like this:

www.flickr.com/Photos.aspx?photo_id=54896695834&user_id=mwichary&type=gallery

Flickr’s didn’t, because someone gave a damn. The fact they did was inspiring; most of the URLs in things I created since owe something to that person. (Please let me know who that was, if you know! My grapevine says it’s Cal Henderson, but I would love a confirmation.)