THE DRIVING GAMES BIBLE

The history of driving games is an unusual one. Whereas most genres follow a linear evolutionary path, becoming steadily more complex and more technically impressive with time, driving games are different. Driving games started in 3D and then went backwards to 2D for several years. They started off quite technically realistic and demanding, then went backwards and became more simplistic and easier. Graphics got prettier, more colourful and more dramatic, then went backwards and became greyer and duller, and so on. We needed someone intimately familiar with the idea of going forwards then backwards to chart it all, so obviously we called Stuart Campbell.

Konami’s 1986 coin-op WEC Le Mans, which isn’t mentioned anywhere in this feature.

The first instance of driving a car in a videogame was on Atari's 1976 classic Night Driver. A black screen faced the player, decorated only with a series of short white posts disappearing into the horizon to produce an eerily convincing sensation of 3D. Speeding through the moonlit world at the kind of game velocity the hardware could impart by, essentially, having no graphics (even your car’s bonnet was just a plastic sticker attached to the monitor), you couldn't afford to take your eyes off the screen for a second.

Steering wheels were next seen in videogame parlours on the Sprint series of overhead-viewed circuit games, starting with Sprint 2 in 1976, confusingly followed by Sprint 4 and Sprint 8 in 1977 and finally Sprint 1 in 1978. The numbering doesn’t denote sequels - although the various games did have different tracks - but the number of players. Sprint 8, impressively, was therefore for eight players simultaneously, all squished around one fairly normal-sized machine and making arcade owners swoon with happiness.

To compensate for the lack of human opposition, Sprint 1 does a remarkable and unique thing: the tracks change while you’re driving. One minute you’re zooming round a nice simple loop, then without warning the entire course switches to a complex crossover route, and then a few seconds later morphs again to a zig-zag collection of long straights, and so on. If you’re not expecting it – and why would you be? – it’s hugely startling and scary.

Night Driver - in fact, not even nearly the first driving videogame. Fooled you! Ha ha!

Night Driver and Sprint both had purely demarcative graphics – that is, wholly abstract lines and dots which served only to mark the distinction between the traversable course and the “walls” marking the limits of where you could go. The first coin-op driving game to feature actual graphics in the sense we understand the term today (that is, depicting some sort of actual scenery) was Atari’s 1977 release Super Bug, which gave the player an identifiable vehicle (a VW Beetle) some dense woodland to drive through. Super Bug also saw the first introduction of “realistic” handling – in addition to having to cope with manual switching through four gears (something not seen in arcade games in the following 30 years), your Bug is prone to drift, fishtailing like crazy if you go round corners too fast. It’s an incredibly demanding game which will leave the most dedicated modern racing fan weeping in a corner within minutes.

Not satisfied with that, though, Atari followed Super Bug up with the conceptually similar Fire Truck the next year (which despite still being in greyscale also saw a significant aesthetic improvement, with the graphics now depicting an identifiable and rather attractive, albeit somewhat Lego-ey, suburban landscape with houses, lawns, trees and parked cars).

Fire Truck was the first - so far the only - co-op driving game, and saw two players charged with steering a single fire engine through the scrolling overhead course, with one of them driving the cab and the other trying to keep the trailer under control. (There was a later single-player version called Smoky Joe.) It’s absurdly difficult, and almost certainly the most technical driving game ever created, making a mockery of Gran Turismo fans and their fiddling with wheel balancing, brake adjusting and grocket fondling. Only when you can complete a 90-second Fire Truck run without a crash can you consider yourself a truly skilled pretend driver.

(Atari had also put out another highly technical and very different coin-op driving game in 1977, the bizarre side-on precision-gear-shift-timer Drag Race, but that turned out to be something of a genre dead-end.)
 

Arcade technology moved fast around this time, and by 1980 some pretty dramatic leaps had been made, most notably in Sega’s legendary racer Monaco GP. (Actually, at this time the company was known as Gremlin/Sega, no relation to the UK software house of later years. Whatever happened to Gremlin, eh?) The first driving game to feature variable terrain, Monaco had icy roads, rain puddles, bumpy gravel tracks, narrow bridges and fantastic tunnel sequences where you could only see cars caught in the narrow conical beam of your headlights, all depicted in glowing full colour. (Monaco’s modernist graphical style still looks pretty good today, and the game was remade for the PS2 a few years ago.)

Monaco’s unofficial sequel Turbo (1981) saw the debut of colour 3D graphics in driving games. Innovatively used to hide enemy cars in dips in the road, the 3D effect was pretty solid, but it by no means sounded the death knell for 2D racing – countless overhead-view vertically-scrolling driving games would continue to come out for several more years, though mostly occupying smaller, quirkier corners of the market. It was the next 3D title, however, that would properly sow the seeds of racing games as we know them today.

LEFT: Pit-lane groupies were much classier in 1980. RIGHT: Turbo included the dangerous speeding ambulance as a wee tip o’the hat to its predecessor, and also introduced classic racing-game staple, the coastal highway.

Namco’s 1982 hit Pole Position is a classic driving game in its own right – fast and slick with big colourful graphics and a memorable track based on the real-life Fuji Speedway - but it introduced a fundamental design change that made it extra-popular with arcade owners and helped it become a ubiquitous worldwide smash.

Pole Position was the first coin-op racing game with a defined ending that would be reached even if you drove flawlessly (previous games theoretically went on for ever if you didn’t crash), putting an upper limit of about five minutes on game time (a big draw for operators in the early 80s, when experts had honed their skills on games like Asteroids, Pac-Man and Defender to the point where they could play for hours and hours on a single credit). Handling was still pretty basic – only two gears and your car could take the tightest bends at full speed without skidding, but Pole Position is nevertheless the grandaddy of every modern racer, and would be the dominant influence on driving games for many years.

The next few years were quiet in terms of significant developments, but 1986 would turn out to be one of the biggest watersheds in driving-game history, with banner releases in every area of the genre, most of them coming from Sega in a sudden determined effort to corner a market it hadn’t had significant presence in since Turbo. For 2D fans, it knocked out a shameless Road Fighter (see THE FORGOTTEN ONES boxout) ripoff - the long-forgotten Space Position - and there were motocross thrills in the shape of Enduro Racer, a distant ancestor of Sega Rally. But the big news, of course, was Out Run. Building on the sprite-scaling technology of the previous year’s minor motorbike hit Hang-On, Out Run blew arcadegoers away with its beautiful graphics, varied scenery, branching routes, evocative music and (let’s be honest here) rather mediocre driving model.

"I told you we wouldn’t turn into a speedboat if we just drove into this at top speed, you moron."

1986 wasn’t done yet, though, and veteran coin-op racing specialists Atari struck back with Super Sprint, a remaking of the very first driving game, Gran Trak 10 (see GENESIS boxout). With stunningly crisp graphics, subtle additions to the basic formula (shortcuts and handling-enhancing powerups bought by picking up spanners from the track) and three steering wheels bolted to the front for multiplayer action, it was a huge success and a sequel, Championship Sprint (basically the same game with new tracks) followed in arcades the same year.

Super Sprint revived the entire dormant overhead single-screen circuit racing sub-genre, and later years would see derivatives like Indy Heat, RC Pro-Am, Badlands (itself the first modern-style battle-racing game) and in particular the immortally-titled Ivan “Ironman” Stewart’s Super Off-Road generate more big hits for Atari and others. Countless clones in arcades and for the 8-bit home micros (including at least half-a-dozen from Codemasters alone) also laid the groundwork for the evolution of the genre into scrolling games like Supercars, Hot Rod and ultimately the much-loved Micro Machines. (For an excellent modern descendant of Super Sprint, try the wonderful download title Pixeljunk Racers on PS3.)
 

1987 was mostly a year of consolidation, with sequel releases like Super Hang-On and Turbo Outrun, along with Namco’s spiritual successor to Pole Position, Final Lap. The most notable release of the year was Taito’s Full Throttle, a game that’s such a staggeringly, breathtakingly blatant ripoff of Out Run that it’s a wonder Yu Suzuki didn’t get all his mates together, go round to Taito and kick their heads in. However, it’s also clearly the skeleton that would later be fleshed out into Chase HQ, so there was a glimmer of redemption on the horizon.

The next great leap forward for the driving game wasn’t far away, though, and in 1988 it arrived in the shape of Hard Drivin’. One of the most genuinely groundbreaking releases of all time, Atari came up with the first ever proper driving simulation and also introduced the first ever true polygon 3D, amid many other innovations. Your car had four gears (for the first time since the mid-70s), a complex functioning dashboard, a force-feedback steering wheel and an ignition key, and you could wander freely around the game area exploring the two different tracks (Speed and Stunt, with its iconic loop-the-loop) to your heart’s desire, even turning around and driving the course backwards until your time ran out if you felt like it.

There were action replays of spectacular crashes – another first – and the game remains practically unique apart from its own sequel Race Drivin’. (Two more sequels were produced but never released.) It didn’t get a halfway-decent home conversion until its 2004 appearance on Midway Arcade Treasures 2 (Xbox, PS2, Gamecube), but finally now everyone can sample its absolutely uncompromising brutal difficulty for themselves. After a couple of laps of Hard Drivin’, controlling a real car is a piece of cake.

While home formats of the time couldn’t come anywhere close to the power required to run it, Hard Drivin’ (along with another Sega sprite-scaler, 1988’s Power Drift by Out Run designer Yu Suzuki) did provide the raw genetic material for Geoff Crammond’s legendary Stunt Car Racer in 1989. SCR remains one of the most fondly-remembered titles of the 16-bit era (though it was also ported successfully on 8-bits) and still occasionally inspires new games like the excellent Gripshift for the 360, PS3 and PSP. It was Crammond’s next title, though, that three years later would go on to exert a profound and lasting influence on the direction of the driving game genre. That game was Formula 1 Grand Prix.

It might not look like much nowadays, but in 1992 F1GP blew everyone’s socks off.

Taking the simulation ball from Hard Drivin’ and sprinting off over the horizon with it (stopping only to pinch a few bits from Indianapolis 500, a 1989 Electronic Arts title that was the first true simulation of a real-world race event), F1GP was an exhaustively detailed sim, including accurately-mapped renditions of all 16 of the F1 tracks of its day (Indy 500 had just a single oval loop) and dozens of authentically-detailed cars.

But it was its driving model that captivated players by the thousand – realistically complex and demanding with endless possibilities for fiddling with the car’s setup, the game offered you as much help with braking, accelerating and steering as you wanted until you got used to the challenge of controlling the car unaided, a system that’s been copied by every “serious” driving game since. It was quite simply a masterpiece of design and implementation, made all the more astonishing by being essentially the work of a single person. Every F1 game of the last 17 years is basically just this with better graphics.

1992 also saw the release of another driving game every bit as influential as F1GP (and even more successful), but which couldn’t have been any more dissimilar to it. Super Mario Kart came out of nowhere, a seemingly-throwaway spinoff release which appeared fully-formed with barely a note of fanfare but went on to become one of Nintendo’s most valuable bloodlines.

Knocked together so quickly it doesn’t even have a proper single-player mode (solo racers still have to drive around in a split-screen letterbox, with half the display wasted on a near-useless map), SMK was nevertheless a runaway hit, helped by not only being able to race a friend on the normal grand-prix tracks but also in a brilliant balloon-popping deathmatch game that’s never been bettered by any of the many sequels. (Other titles in the series have notably better single-player courses and play mechanics - particularly Mario Kart 64 – and have permitted the participation of many more players, but none have ever approached or even simply replicated the genius of SMK’s deathmatch game.)
 

With occasional exceptions like Mario Kart and successful series like the Lotus Challenge games on the Amiga and Atari ST, driving games on home formats were still fairly rare in 1992, as even pseudo-3D racing stretched the hardware of the era to its limits. The arcades, though, posted notice of what was to come with the release of Virtua Racing, Sega’s magnificent and groundbreaking true-3D classic that took Hard Drivin’s fully-built and freely-navigable worlds and finally gave them racing speed. It was the following year, however, that would be the biggest watershed in the history of the genre. 1993 saw the debuts of Ridge Racer and Daytona, two coin-op hits which would turn out to be the flagships of the next generation of home console wars.

The two games have much in common, not least the exaggerated drift-based handling style that’s almost ubiquitous now but was still in its infancy at the time. Ridge, though, narrowly made it to market first, and a frankly incredible Playstation conversion - put together by a tiny handful of people in just six months for the machine’s launch - all but strangled the Saturn at birth. While it actually did very well as a translation of the coin-op’s gameplay, Daytona Saturn’s atrocious pop-up, crude textures and iffy framerate were an embarrassment next to the crisp, near-arcade-perfect PS rendition of Ridge Racer, creating a perception of technical inferiority that was only partially true but would hamper the Saturn all its life.

The game, too, has been generally held by history to be slightly inferior to its Namco rival, as evidenced by the numerous sequels to Ridge, while Daytona only managed one (unsuccessful) arcade follow-up and none on home formats. (That's unless you count the four semi-sequel reworkings of the original game which appeared on various formats and in various territories: Championship Circuit Edition, Deluxe, Circuit Edition and 2001, which between them contributed six new tracks and several other new features, arguably making them equally valid as sequels as standalone titles like Ridge Racer Revolution.)

Blue, blue skies in Ridge Racer Revolution, the first of many sequels to Namco’s all-time classic.

Historians differ on the reasons for Ridge Racer’s ultimate victory  - and indeed in arcades you’re still more likely to encounter Daytona cabinets, because Sega far-sightedly concentrated more on installing up to eight linked-up multiple machines whereas Namco’s flagship was the stunning single-player-focused “Full Scale” edition of Ridge, featuring an entire real Mazda MX-5 car for the driver to sit in, which took up as much space as four Daytonas but only brought in one credit's worth of money at a time.

Some point to Ridge's much friendlier drifting model, but the most convincing argument centres around character. While Daytona has very distinctive, memorable courses, they’re oddly sterile and soulless, something which can be attributed to the bizarre near-total lack of buildings in them - apart from two tiny stretches of Seaside Street Galaxy, there’s nowhere in Daytona that anyone might live, which is odd for a game carrying the name of a real-life place.

While RR appears to take place in a real city packed with skyscrapers, hotels, billboards and petrol stations, instantly engaging the player in a captivating and believable environment reinforced by an excitable commentator, Daytona is set in a ghost world, with bridges and tunnels leading from nowhere to nowhere and no sign of human habitation except the disembodied voices singing the famous backing songs, and the game simply doesn’t create the same emotional bond with the player that’s sustained the RR franchise for 15 years.)
 

In truth, 1993 marked the end of major innovation in the driving genre, and everything that’s happened since has been basically a logical evolution of the gaming DNA that was already in place by that time. Wipeout on the Playstation, for example, represented a cultural and economic phenomenon, but in gaming terms it’s just Super Mario Kart with futuristic graphics. 1995’s Sega Rally created a sub-genre of rallying titles, but the meaningful differences between it and road-racers like Ridge and Daytona were largely superficial (and invented by Monaco GP anyway), although it would eventually develop into the likes of Motorstorm, where the effect of different terrain becomes so significant as to genuinely alter the core gameplay mechanic.

(Motorstorm’s other parent, incidentally, is the 1996 Konami find-your-own-route coin-op GTI Club, whose lack of a home port was one of the great tragedies of driving game history until it appeared as a PS3 download game in 2008.)

That leaves us with only two significant strands of driving-game bloodline left to chart, a pair of close relations which comprise the two most prominent brands in the modern genre. The 1997 release on the Playstation of Gran Turismo was half of a cultural double-whammy that ended the brief Wipeout-inspired era of console games being seen as hip and cutting-edge in the wider world of fashion. While lifestyle magazines like The Face had for a while been dazzled by the Designers Republic stylings and big-beat soundtracks of the futurist hover-racer, and also by the iconic “girl-power” figure of Lara Croft, Gran Turismo (along with its spiritual sibling Final Fantasy VII) swiftly reasserted the jealously-guarded reign of the traditional obsessive, conservative and socially-dysfunctional nerd over the world of videogaming.

WipEout – very, very briefly making games cool.

Not so much a driving game as a simulation of being a pit mechanic and a used-car dealer rolled into one, GT picked up an oily baton from Geoff Crammond’s F1GP and distilled it even further, fixating on a strange and highly-selective definition of “realism” aimed at science geeks with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

(As opposed, that is, to the replication-by-exaggeration of the adrenaline rush of high-speed driving that had been the goal of Ridge Racer designer Fumihiro Tanaka. One of the developers of the PS version recently explained the concept to our splendid sister magazine Retro Gamer: “Ridge Racer is different from other companies’ racing games - even for people who can’t drive in real life, if they play Ridge Racer they get a sense of how good it must feel to drive fast.” This ethos has most recently been seen in Sega’s fantastic modern updatings of Out Run.)

In GT, reckless thrillseekers are immediately discouraged by interminable technical “licence tests”, bearing no relation to the skills required in actual races, before they’re allowed to enter one at all. Yet conversely, the game inflicts only the smallest of penalties for smashing into opponents at 220mph. Go figure. Tracks, too, are largely identikit grey professional circuits, with a few more-exciting street courses grudgingly thrown in for a bit of variety.
 

But the world comprises more dullards than superstars, and accordingly the GT series has shifted close to 50 million copies across the globe so far, not counting the suffocating hordes of less-accomplished clones it also inspired (even getting one into arcades, in the shape of Sega’s 1999 uber-sim Ferrari F355 Challenge). But one game which attempted to merge GT’s nerd appeal with the character and exhilaration of Ridge has been almost as successful, at least in terms of reaching its potential audience.

Metropolis Street Racing arrived on the Dreamcast in 2000, and applied realistic driving physics and real-life cars to a game not only set in glamorous and accurately-mapped real-world city streets, but which also rewarded the player for irresponsible show-off stunt driving. (Another example, incidentally, of the influence of GTI Club.) Escaping the bonds of Sega’s doomed console for the Xbox and undergoing a name change to Project Gotham Racing, the series went from strength to strength, and offers car geeks a slightly more exotic and expressive way to indulge a borderline-autistic collecting mania. (Whoever said that GT and PGR were basically Pokemon for slightly older gamers was a wise sage indeed.)

And that’s pretty much it for now. Every driving game of the last decade or more has been derived - with varying degrees and elements of crossover – from half a dozen basic part sets, namely Ridge Racer, Out Run, Wipeout, Crazy Cars 3, GTI Club and F1GP, and there’s little sign of that changing in the forseeable future, despite about one game in every three released for the major consoles being a driving title of some sort or another. Perhaps only an unlikely flop for the (sort of) imminent (ish) GT5 could cause a real shake-up in the status quo, and it’d take a brave man indeed to predict that.