Stunts (4D Sports Driving)

Build your own track full of loops, jumps and crazy corners, get into a sports car and then watch how your mistake ends in a spectacular crash with somersaults across the whole screen. Stunts, also known as 4D Sports Driving, is a racing game on the Commodore Amiga that combined driving simulation with creative freedom and black humor in the form of unforgettable crashes.

The heart of the game is the track editor. You could assemble circuits from blocks and pieces like a slot car set, add ramps, tunnels, bridges, loops and hairpins and then unleash a collection of cars with different handling characteristics onto your creations. This freedom meant practically endless replayability, because you could build tracks from peaceful circuits all the way to suicidal creations where a single mistake sent the car into the air. The driving model was surprisingly elaborate for its time and every car behaved differently, so mastering the fastest of them was a real challenge.

But Stunts most etched itself into memory with its crashes. When you overdid it, the camera switched and showed you with gusto how your car rolled, broke and fell apart, often with a morbidly funny touch. It was precisely this spectacle that made the games not only a race against the clock but also a bit of a contest for the most spectacular destruction, and generated heaps of merry moments at the monitor.

In its time it was a title with cult status on PC and Amiga, where it built a loyal base of players. The combination of simulation ambitions, polygonal 3D graphics and the main draw in the form of the track editor was refreshing at a time when most racing games offered only fixed circuits. The ability to share and compare your own tracks and times also gave the game a community dimension that kept it alive long after release.

The cultural footprint of Stunts is still evident to this day, especially in the community of enthusiasts who return to it for the editor and the competition for the best times. The game is mentioned as one of the early examples of how creating your own content can extend the life of a title for many years, and for many players of the nineties it remains a symbol of fun where winning was just as good as a properly theatrical crash.

On the Amiga, Stunts found its loyal audience, who appreciated the combination of decent performance and the creative freedom of the editor. Creating your own tracks, tuning them into the most frantic forms and then boasting to friends with the best time or the wildest crash, that was fun that lasted long after playing through the prepared circuits. The game thus was ahead of its time in how much emphasis it placed on content created by the players themselves, which is a given today but back then was a refreshing exception that helped rank Stunts among the quiet classics.

Why play: For the endless building of crazy tracks and for that perverse joy of the most spectacular crash possible.