Stunts

Stunts is a racing game that took a seriously designed driving model and let it loose on tracks full of loops, corkscrews, ski jumps, and bridges leading into thin air. The player chooses from a selection of cars based on real-world models, from sharp sports cars to circuit specials, and each handles, accelerates, and grips differently. You race either against a computer opponent or against your own time, and it's precisely the chase for a better time on a familiar track that keeps the game alive to this day.

Its strongest weapon is the track editor. Assembling a circuit from tiles is straightforward enough that a first custom track takes shape in a few minutes, while still allowing players to build monstrosities that couldn't exist in an ordinary racing game. On top of that, the game offers replay recording with switchable cameras, so players could watch back a well-landed helicopter jump from behind the car as well. The graphics are simple, fully polygonal, and run smoothly even on modest hardware, which wasn't a given at the time. Crashes have their own short animations, after which the driver climbs out of the wreck, and this small comic detail became part of the game's identity.

At the time Stunts caught on thanks to its combination of accessibility and unexpected depth. Those who wanted to just have fun could drive for fun; those who wanted more honed their braking points and hunted for shortcuts on the tracks. A community still gathers around the game to this day, running time-trial competitions and sharing custom tracks, which is exceptional for a title from the early nineties. Today's player will find the controls oddly heavy-handed until they get used to how the cars respond, but after a few laps exactly that addictive rhythm sets in, the reason people keep coming back to Stunts after all these years. It also helps that the game is undemanding, launches practically anywhere, and a single track barely takes a minute, so an attempt at a better time can be repeated endlessly. Few racing games of that era offer such a direct ratio between time invested and visible improvement.