Stunt Car Racer
Stunt Car Racer is quite simply one of the most breathtaking driving sensations of all time. Racing around a roller coaster type track in a beach buggy was one of the most original racing ideas in a long time.
A full 3D game, Stunt Car Racer was good on the Commodore 64 with wireframe graphics but with filled polygons it looked absolutely amazing.
Along with full 3D came the physics. A thing of beauty, it ‘solidified’ the track. Rev the engine up a hill and see the wheels lift off the ground, keep going and you were airborne but floating a few feet from the track as you followed its parabolic arch until your wheels again gripped the track. Fantastic!
The track was precarious, only a couple of cars wide, which made for some extremely hairy overtaking but it was the design which gave Stunt Car the edge. Named after a particular feature, the tracks highlighted the physics engine; each one requiring different styles of driving finesse. Take the Stepping Stones – a crenellated section of track which required you to jump your buggy at roughly 140mph over each one. How about the Ski-Jump? A ramp which launched you into a terrifying drop of three hundred feet, which had to be done at the right speed. It was so easy just to bounce straight off the track and into the dirt (which pretty much lost you the race) or drill a hole straight through your car’s chassis. You mean I didn’t mention the damage model?
The damage model was simple. The faster you take corners and jumps, the longer the hairline fracture across the top of the rollbar becomes. Miss a jump or hit a wall and a large hole would appear in the rollbar. The crack travels faster across holes, see? Winning a race often meant almost driving the car into the ground, but max out the fracture and you wreck the car. (Though you can wreck over the finish line and still make it.)
The engine noise, though perfect for the game must have driven my neighbours insane as I played night after night. They would hear a squeal of metal as I surfed the edge of the track, the whine of the engine as I turboed down a hill doing over 230 mph. And finally they’d hear my outraged cry and a dull thud as I threw the joystick to the ground. I’d lost again.
An excellent use of turbo, none of this dilating vision trickery, Stunt Car Racer’s turbo was just nitrous. Flames shot from the four exhausts on either side of you and the car gradually picked up speed. A judicious boost up a hill would bring your speed to the correct level for the jump, allowing you to land gracefully on the down-ramp on the other side.
No power-ups, no weapons, just raw, driving skill. And not just against the computer. One of the first linkable driving games,Stunt Car Racer had the ability to link two Amigas or an Amiga & an Atari ST together!
Supremely difficult, it was actually finishable, although some of the tracks seemed impossible. Geoff Crammond (who went on to program Formula 1 Grand Prix 1 & 2) made a slight competitive alteration to the other car – it had a much lower jump parabola, meaning that it almost always touched the ground first.
Geoff Crammond said in an interview after putting the finishing touches to Formula 1 Grand Prix 2 that he may use the engine for SCR 2.
Update on this : There isn’t one. Sir Geoffrey has just released F1GP 3 for Microprose. Don’t we have enough F1 games already?
Update on this update (21/9/04) : Stunt Car Racer 2 was in development with Lost Toys and Geoff Crammond in a producer role, much like Jordan Mechner’s role on the Prince of Persia: Time series. However Lost Toys appears to have gone under.
A screenshot of the Commodore 64 version, unfortunately this was the model used for the PC version and as a result, it only ran in CGA.