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posted by martyb on Monday April 30 2018, @04:24PM   Printer-friendly
from the Vrooom!-Vrooom! dept.

Here's a bit o' history of cars in video games:

From Wipeout to Ridge Racer to Motorhead, the original PlayStation marked the inflection point where home console hardware finally caught up with the outsized ambitions of simulation-minded developers everywhere. At the same time, the success of classics like Gran Turismo on the sales charts helped cement the genre as a commercial force. But it was 1994’s Road and Track Presents: The Need for Speed—a mouthful of a title, especially for the starting point of a much-vaunted franchise—that served as one of the very first truly excellent home driving games. Developed by EA and originally consigned to the doomed early disc-based machine known as the 3DO, art lead Markus Tessmann distinctly recalls working around both the strict hardware limitations of the ailing console and the somewhat-strained budget assigned to the unproven team.

According to Tessmann, EA had cajoled him out of his decade-long career making top-flight 3D graphics for feature films and commercials with the promise that his expertise would help them make cutting-edge 3D games. But after etching a handful of traditional pixel-art games for the Sega Genesis, Tessmann began to grow exasperated. That is, until he heard about their next project. “They told us that they wanted us to make a driving game for the 3DO, and I thought that was great,” he says. “But then they told us that they wanted it to be a 2D game similar to Sega’s OutRun, or the hit game of the time, Road Rash. Just 2D bitmaps of cars that we’d scale, to give the illusion of depth. I was like, are you fucking kidding me? That makes no sense. It’s the 3DO, not the 2DO.”


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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @07:04PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @07:04PM (#673859)

    Oh look, someone trying to convince the Younger Generations that he invented 3D Car Sims.

    No.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunt_Car_Racer [wikipedia.org]

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @01:38AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @01:38AM (#673991)

    You can go back further if you include arcade games, Atari Hard Drivin' was true 3D with polygon graphics (about a thousand polys in the view window, I believe), a real physics model for the car and force-feedback on the steering that was coupled to the tire forces generated by the physics model. A number of these features were successfully patented. One link, https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=8072 [arcade-museum.com]

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @10:22PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @10:22PM (#674336)

      I played arcades since lunar lander to sega rally 2 (a shiny OutRun personal record over 50000000 BTW). Hard Drivin' is the only one that I would call driving simulation. The feedback on the wheel is outstanding. Piece of art, try it if you can.

  • (Score: 2) by bootsy on Tuesday May 01 2018, @08:27AM

    by bootsy (3440) on Tuesday May 01 2018, @08:27AM (#674076)

    The author then went onto write MicroProse's Formula One Grand Prix. I loved both that and Stunt Car racer, especially in Null Modem Link mode between two Amigas or STs or 1 of each.