ROAD BLASTER

ARCADE, 1985

You might be looking at the image above and then at the midEighties date below it and wondering why, in contrast to most other games at the time, Japanese arcade title Road Blaster doesn’t look like a handful of brightly coloured squares having an argument. The answer is that at the heart of this arcade cabinet was a LaserDisc, essentially a DVD the size of a dinner plate. The benefit was pre-recorded graphics that looked like they were ripped straight from Saturday morning cartoons, the drawback was that these games boasted about as much interactivity as browsing your Netflix catalogue.

Road Blaster was essentially a 30-minute animated film, with prompts to either turn left or right, brake to avoid collisions and activate a ‘turbo boost’ to ram other vehicles. Get a cue right and the cartoon progressed to the next scene, get it wrong, as you would multiple times during a trial and error playthrough, and you’d be treated to a clip that, for example, showed you cartwheeling down the road and bursting into flames.

Plotwise Road Blaster was heavily inspired by the Mad Max movies, with the newlywed hero’s wife killed on their honeymoon by a criminal automotive gang. And much like in those movies, the only rational response to something like that happening is to supercharge your car and wreak bloody vengeance on the highways. Look, you wouldn’t watch a film called Sad Max, would you?

Road Blaster rarely surfaced outside of Japan and only made it out of the arcades and into homes in the early Nineties when CD-ROM based consoles were more prevalent. But while you almost certainly never played it, it remains a strange, unique curio in the history of driving games. Well, in the history of ‘pressing left at the correct time to avoid a huge crash’ games at the very least...