In the game, a single player drives a car along a race track, viewed from above, avoiding walls of pylons and trying to pass as many checkpoints as possible before time runs out.

The game is controlled with a steering wheel, accelerator and brake pedals, and a gear stick, and the car crashes and spins if it hits a pylon.

The course is defined on the screen by walls of white dots representing pylons, which if hit stop the car and spin it.

Larry Emmons developed the circuits to control the car itself in the game, creating the feel of braking, acceleration, and movement.

Emmons also used integrated circuit-based memory—specifically, mask ROM (read-only memory)—in his circuit design to store graphical data such as the tracks, rather than the diode arrays that previous arcade games used.

This in turn left Lloyd Warman, new to the company, as the head of engineering for Atari during Gran Trak's development.

This was exacerbated by a new short-lived Atari management team and product development structure, which led to several communication problems and cost overruns.

When Atari began production in early 1974, it had difficulties getting enough circuits to build the cabinets from National Semiconductor, who cited a "hybrid" integrated circuit design by Emmons as non-standard, first refusing to sell them to Atari and then producing only small production runs.

[7][12] Alcorn later stated in an interview that neither Warman nor Emmons understood the challenges in converting a prototype design to a product that could be manufactured.

As a result, a single Gran Trak game ended up costing US$1,095 to manufacture, while Atari was selling them to distributors for only $995, losing $100 per sale.

Atari soon corrected the problem, but ended the fiscal year with a large loss due in part to the financial failure of the game.