THE TOP 10 RACING GAMES
YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF

Stuart Campbell is really old, and while this means he can’t remember what he went to the Post Office for, he can remember loads of old videogames that you can’t. If you indulge him by listening as he tells you about some of them now, he promises not to go on about the war and how it all used to be fields round here.

When it comes to retrogaming, racing games aren’t traditionally our beloved field’s strongest suit. Racers really came into their own in the 32-bit era, when the speedy processors of the Playstation and the Saturn finally made proper 3D viable, and on first look it doesn’t seem like there was all that much for retroheads to get excited about before 1994 or so. But in fact, that’s only true if you have an incredibly superficial definition of what a racing game is.

Around the turn of the millennium there was a paradigm shift in the genre (Man! I’ve always wanted to say “paradigm shift in the genre”!), at which point it became almost impossible to get anyone to publish any game involving cars which didn’t involve agonising, painstaking technical driving just to get round a single lap of the first track, adjusting your individual wheelnuts for 20 minutes before every race, and having to work for hours and hours to “unlock” things before the game would even let you have a go on any of the fun courses. (Thankfully there’s a bit of a backlash going on again at the moment, with your Burnouts and your Full Autos and your Ridge Racers back in the picture.)

But racing games weren’t always such stuck-up dullard killjoys. In the old days, during the war when it all used to be fields round here, racing games came in a hundred different flavours. RG47 listed 25 of the most popular, but what about all the classics that snuck under the radar? What about all the games that influenced some of today’s biggest names, but never get any credit for it because only three people ever played them? It’s an outrage! If I was you, I’d DEMAND that someone tells you about at least ten of them RIGHT THIS MINUTE. Write to your MP if necessary.

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10. AB COP
(Arcade/1990/Sega)

A game as pathologically shallow as AB Cop never stood a chance of
getting a home release, but fortunately it runs a treat in MAME.

Sega’s distinctively-styled sprite-scaling coin-ops of the early 1990s – Out Run, After Burner, Space Harrier, and lesser lights like Galaxy Force and Power Drift – are endlessly lionised by videogamers, which makes it all the stranger that AB Cop has had posterity entirely pass it by. At heart a ripoff of Chase HQ from two years earlier, AB Cop puts you in the helmet of a law-enforcement officer on an “air bike” (hence AB), charged with hunting down the scary alien monsters leading a set of motorcycle gangs. Armed only with a brief but infinitely-recharging turbo boost and a limited jump ability, you have to ram all the bikers off their mounts before the time limit runs out, at which point you get to tackle the giant boss head-on.

But while the formula is as generic as can be, the thing that marks AB Cop out is the sheer frivolous joy of it. The levels are fast, hectic and short, the bosses are mostly pretty easy, and the shit-eating grin your character turns to flash at you at the end of each stage sums up perfectly the 30 seconds of dumb fun you’ve just shared and the anticipation of the next 30. It’s kind of like going round to Burnout 3’s house and meeting his dad, who turns out to be really funny and much more entertaining to be around than his rather po-faced wannabe-gangsta offspring. It’s a real shame that it’s complete rubbish like After Burner that gets remembered from that halcyon Sega era instead of games like AB Cop, but then on the other hand you get the pleasant surprise of discovering it now, so everyone wins in the end. Phew!

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