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The Best Racing Games of All Time

For about as long as there have been video games, there have been video games about cars.

The Best Racing Games of All Time

For about as long as there have been video games, there have been video games about cars. It’s a natural extension of the technology: We sit in front of a machine to be transported, virtually, behind the wheel of another one. Like fighting games and first-person shooters, driving games put us in command of experiences too dangerous to enjoy for real, liberating us from concerns of safety and responsibility and inviting us, all too gleefully, to push the limits of what can be done. Maybe you drive every day—a commute to work, an errand to the corner store. Driving games take that experience and amplify it, transforming the banality of the car into something extraordinary: an object to steal, to race, to destroy. Games do a lot with a four wheels and an engine. In life your car is bound to the rules of the road. In games it can go anywhere, do anything.

Editor’s Note: This post is sponsored by Autotrader.com.


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10. Desert Bus (1995)

The object of Desert Bus, a minigame included in the SegaCD novelty anthology Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors, is simply to drive from Tucson, Arizona, to Las Vegas, Nevada, in real time, without veering off road. The trip takes eight hours to complete. There are no pit stops, side-missions, enemies, or save points, and the bus subtly pulls to the right, which means you have to pay careful attention to steering. Desert Bus has been called “the worst video game ever created,” and it isn’t difficult to understand why: It’s tedium incarnate. But that’s also the genius of the only driving game to ever authentically simulate the stupefying boredom of being on the road. That’s not merely novel—it’s audacious.


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9. Crazy Taxi (1999)

On the Sega Dreamcast, where it figured too prominently into the burgeoning platform’s lineup, Crazy Taxi seemed a mite insubstantial: a wisp of a game, each session over only minutes after starting, as repetitive as the two unceasing Offspring songs on the soundtrack. This was only a problem of context, as Crazy Taxi was made for the coin-op simplicity of an arcade, where its manic rhythms could be indulged, fleetingly, for a few quarters at a time. It was there, as a standalone machine, that players could sweat out the pressure of each time limit, hurtling down side streets to check off one last fare.


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8. Daytona USA (1993)

For gamers of a certain age, the euphoria felt when slumping down into a Daytona USA machine for the first time was revelatory. Here was a car that could be driven, could be raced, that felt, looked, and sounded like the real thing. 3D was in its infancy, and the virtual Daytona racetracks, gendered in glorious color, seemed no less than a quantum leap. Naturally the game lost something across its years-later ports to the home-console market (the Sega Saturn iteration never stood a chance), but wherever modern racing games approach an illusion of realism, Daytona’s influence vividly remains.

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7. Star Wars Episode I – Racer (1999)

If Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace ever came close to justifying its dismal existence, it was surely here, in Star Wars Episode I – Racer, the only worthwhile video-game adaptation of the film amid a seemingly endless deluge of them. It was probably clear from the outset that the film’s podracing sequence, however ineptly mounted on screen, could be translated quite seamlessly to the world of gaming, but it no doubt surprised even franchise die hards to find that the end result wasn’t only good, but, astonishingly, sort of great. This is driving—of a kind—at its fastest, lightest, and perhaps most exciting.


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6. Micro Machines (1991)

Part of the reason early game developers avoided the top-down perspective for driving titles was that navigation posed an obvious challenge: Without a long-range view of what’s ahead, players were bound to start crashing into objects when they suddenly appeared. But Micro Machines, a budget game by Codemasters, seized upon this fault as its distinguishing feature: Zipping around a veritable obstacle course without any clear idea of what’s more than a few feet ahead transformed ordinary racing into a nerve-wracking exercise in game tension. It was a brilliant modulation on a well-known formula, and it made Micro Machines one of the essential driving games of its generation.


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5. Need for Speed: Rivals (2013)

Driving games, of course, are more popular than ever, but last year’s Need for Speed: Rivals stands above its contemporaries for its one simple—and, frankly, ingenious—technical innovation. An open-world dynamic in racing is nothing new, of course, but Rivals offered something more: the integration of online multiplayer into ordinary single-player action so seamlessly that you hardly notice transitioning between the two. And so, while you’re going about your business completing time trials and offline challenges, in swoops another player, swerving his cop car into your rearview and throwing on the sirens. Call it gamus interruptus, as you’re left to either abandon your mission to evade the threat, or, more appealingly still, carry on and deal with it simultaneously. Either way, the effect is thrilling.


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4. Burnout Revenge (2005)

If, as the axiom goes, people only watch Nascar for the crashes, then it must follow that what people like best about racing games is the same. Burnout Revenge recognized this quality of human nature and made it the main event: Driving here plainly takes a backseat to crashing one full-throttle piece of hardware into another (or several), savoring the fallout in a flourish of slow-motion replay. And as if simply crashing while racing weren’t satisfying enough, Revenge permitted players to enjoy the carnage afforded by its full-blown car crash simulator, in which an epic of Ballardian twisted metal could be orchestrated in precise detail. Is it all a bit stupid? Most certainly. But rarely has stupidity yielded such vigorous entertainment.

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3. Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec (2001)

Driving games, before the arrival of the Gran Turismo series, were largely the domain of arcades, whose built-in steering wheels and chunky plastic builds made racing seem like virtual bumper cars. But Gran Turismo offered a glimpse of a different purpose: Not the fantasy of doing what you want with a car, but the simulation of really driving one. The PlayStation 2’s first genuine killer app, Gran Turismo 3: A-Spec was an evolutionary leap that made realism finally seem attainable, a game of such rigorous verisimilitude that—save for the perennially undamageable cars—everything seemed exactly true to life.


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2. Super Mario Kart (1992)

The ongoing history of the Super Mario Kart franchise is, to be sure, one of useful expansion and improvement, and persuasive cases have been made that, with the possible exception of Double Dash, the Mario Kart games keep getting better. And yet, there’s something about the simplicity of the original Super Mario Kart—the purity, let’s say, or the elegance—that feels in many ways more substantial than the furnishings doled out by later iterations. The Mario Kart series has retained the core mechanics of its Super Nintendo debut for a reason: They’re essentially unimprovable, the foundation for what makes this games such a delight.


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1. Pole Position (1992)

All driving games are, in one way or another, Pole Position imitators, if not in look or feel than in spirit. That feeling of being behind the steering wheel, of being in control of speed and movement, had its beginnings here, way back in 1982. The game pushed the limits of meager technology and yet managed to include every basic element needed to convey the essence of a race: You drive down a track toward the finish line, timed exactly, as you avoid fellow racers and swerve precisely to make sharp turns. Every minute obstacle had the power to make you fail—to make you lose your quarter. A successful race is won a margin of milliseconds. You feel fast, but precarious, as the slightest mistake can ruin you. Nothing more is needed of a game.

Calum Marsh

Calum Marsh is a critic, reporter, and essayist who specializes in art and culture. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Playboy, The New Republic, Pitchfork, and other publications.

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