HARD DRIVIN’

ATARI, 1989

If you vaguely remember a small-scale riot taking place at your local arcade back in 1989, chances are it was something to do with the release of this preposterously ambitious stunt sim. One of the first games to feature a polygon-based 3D environment, Hard Drivin’ also boasted a number of pioneering touches for the racer genre: action replays, airborne physics and a clutch pedal to operate the manual gearbox. It’s no wonder the game humbly referred to itself as “the world’s first authentic driving simulation game”.

On starting a race you had two routes to choose from: pin the throttle and head straight on for the speed course or veer to the right into a stunt course, which included vertiginous jumps and imposing banked turns. Pick the latter and you’d engage in a knife-edge dance between successfully hitting the checkpoints within the time limit and accidentally launching your car into orbit. A heavy landing treated you to a cracked windscreen, followed by a brief replay of your steed detonating like it was stuffed with Semtex.

Mastering the handling, which often saw you skating wildly across the surface of the road, was a badge of honour in an era when most arcade racers were disposable two-dimensional thrill rides. Post a fast enough lap and you could even challenge the Phantom Photon, a ghost car, in a single-lap shootout. Defeat this adversary and you’d enter your name and be immortalised as the one to beat. Well, immortalised right up until the point where a bored-looking teenager came round to switch the arcade machine off at the end of the day.

Hard Drivin’ also featured the unique spectacle of a large, box-body truck performing a full 360-degree loop-the-loop. A dramatic feat you would usually witness, to your fiery dismay, as you were already halfway around said loop-the-loop heading in the opposite direction. All this in a game released the year before the internet as we know it was invented.