“Today’s racing spectators wanted power, excitement and… danger! The year is 2008 and this promises to be the fastest and most dangerous season of the lot.”
I remember playing Stunt Car Racer, but more than any other game so far, I remember something else from its oversized box. It came with a history of motorsport, and Formula 1 in particular, which eventually turned speculative, a look back from an imaginary future. You can download it here.
Back in reality, most of a decade after Stunt Car Racer‘s 2008, that opening quote feels all too relevant. Since then, Formula 1 changed tyres and car design and banned refuelling to encourage more overtaking on the track. Now the complaints come that drivers are managing their cars’ limitations more than driving with full power, and that’s not exciting. No one is normally gauche enough to actually say that it’s less exciting because it means drivers make fewer mistakes and crash less often, but danger lurks at the edge of conversations. Driving today’s cars isn’t scary enough, complained four-times champion Sebastian Vettel earlier this year. Meanwhile fellow driver Jules Bianchi lay in a coma, never to recover, as a result of a mid-race crash.
In 1989, when Stunt Car Racer was released, no Formula 1 driver had died during a race weekend for seven years, which doesn’t sound much until you compare it to five such deaths in the corresponding period from 1975-1982. Stunt Car Racer’s history set out a future in which technological advances, complacence about safety and a yearning for more excitement led to new ways of escalating thrills. The endpoint it saw was a championship where overpowered cars with flame-throwing turbo engines raced on elevated roller-coasters of tracks.
If you’re thinking that it sounds like a predecessor to Mario Kart’s cartoon racing, you’re right and wrong. Stunt Car Racer creator Geoff Crammond made more straightforwardly realistic motor racing simulations before and after, and didn’t abandon realism in this case. The cockpit view and predictable and convincing physics mean that Stunt Car Racer is still really a simulator, except one simulating dodging sheer drops and making enormous, stomach-churning leaps over chasms. When you crash and get placed back onto the track, it stretches believability, but even that’s a process grounded in the tangible. You wait, suspended, while visible chains creak away to lift, a real feeling of weight and fragility to the car. On the Commodore 64, its austere graphics – one colour for the sky, one for everything else, 3D view marked out in black and white lines – further take away distracting questions of practicality, leaving you to concentrate on the racing experience, simple but with well-built depths.
Your turbo is limited and worth conserving for when it counts most. You face only one opponent a race, but there are points on offer for fastest lap as well as victory, meaning an incentive to carry on going even if you get hopelessly behind. It’s not always best to go flat out, though, because the car accumulates damage which lasts across races, represented by an ominous crack in the bodywork which snakes along further with each wince-inducing hit. It’s difficult, but fair. And as well as offering a compelling racing experience, the extent to which Stunt Car Racer gets you concentrating on the fine details of navigating the bumps in the road ahead also leads to another effect.
See, after a while, the extreme aspects of its concept to start to seem… not dull, but a little mundane. Taking racing on tracks called things like “The High Jump” and “The Stepping Stones” and making it appear serious and routine gives Stunt Car Racer an added edge: it’s the deepest, best executed satire we’ll encounter for a while. It doesn’t confront the question of danger entirely head on (and I don’t know if ending seasons prematurely with a message about your character’s death would quite have worked) but it gets pointedly close as you get used to ridiculous risks. Is this so different from what you’re already watching? Isn’t this what you want? it asks, with every crunching impact. Why not just admit it?
[This piece originally appeared on AAA.]