Remembering classic games: Stunt Car Racer (1989)

Modern Formula One facilities are phenomenally safe. Run off the track and you usually have a Disneyland car park's worth of asphalt in which to make your way back onto the course. Compare that to 1989's Stunt Car Racer, where straying beyond track limits on the rollercoaster-like elevated circuits would see you plunging a minimum of 50 feet and ending up embedded in the dirt like a wayward javelin.

The two things have more in common than you'd think, though. Stunt Car Racer was the brain child of Geoff Crammond, better known as the human scientific calculator behind the Grand Prix series of F1 simulators. Stunt Car Racer is what happens when hardcore physics nerds let their hair down: an utterly ludicrous racing game with extremely accurately modelled suspension. These guys know how to party.

Having its roots in a simulation engine, it wasn't enough to simply charge around the track as fast as possible in Stunt Car Racer, because particularly jarring impacts over jumps would cause a crack to creep along the tube frame chassis that surrounded the screen. You also needed to carefully manage your 'turbo' deployment, which briefly turned the visible engine into a sort of novelty barbecue. That management is less about using it all up too soon in a race, incidentally, and much more about avoiding sailing over a jump, side pipes ablaze, and accidentally escaping the Earth's gravitational pull.

Every circuit in the game was a knife-edge balancing act, where one poorly positioned wheel could have you tumbling towards terra firma. The game’s ultimate test, though, was Division One track the Ski Jump, a loop with a sheer drop that left you in freefall for five whole seconds every single lap. Survive that without smashing your spaceframe to pieces and you could consider yourself master of 16-bit racing’s most fearsome challenge.