EM driving games later evolved in Japan, with Kasco's 1968 racing game Indy 500, which was licensed by Chicago Coin for release in North America as Speedway in 1969. Indy 500 sold over 2,000 arcade cabinets in Japan, while Speedway sold over 10,000 cabinets in North America, becoming one of the biggest arcade hits of the 1960s. Taito's similar 1970 rear-projection driving game Super Road 7 involved driving a car down an endlessly scrolling road while having to dodge cars, which formed the basis for Taito's 1974 racing video game Speed Race. Pole Position, developed by Namco and released by Atari in North America, was released in 1982. It is considered "arguably the most important racing game ever made." It was an evolution of Namco's earlier racing electro-mechanical games, notably F-1 , whose designer Sho Osugi worked on Pole Position. Pole Position was the first video game to be based on a real racing circuit, and the first with a qualifying lap, where the player needs to complete a time trial before they can compete in Grand Prix races.
While not the first third-person racing video game (it was predated by Sega's Turbo), Pole Position established the conventions of the genre and its success inspired numerous imitators. According to Electronic Games, for "the first time in the amusement parlors, a first-person racing game gives a higher reward for passing cars and finishing among the leaders rather than just for keeping all four wheels on the road". According to IGN, it also "introduced checkpoints," and its success, as "the highest-grossing arcade game of 1983 in North America, cemented the genre in place for decades to come and inspired a horde of other racing games". It sold over 21,000 arcade cabinets in the US by 1983, and again became the highest-grossing arcade game of 1984 in the US. The basis for racing video games were arcade driving electro-mechanical games . The earliest mechanical racing arcade game dates back to 1900, when the London-based Automatic Sports Company manufactured a mechanical yacht racing game, Yacht Racer.
Mechanical car driving games later originated from British amusement arcades in the 1930s. In the United States, International Mutoscope Reel Company adapted these British arcade driving games into the electro-mechanical game Drive Mobile , which had an upright arcade cabinet similar to what arcade video games would later use. A steering wheel was used to control a model car over a road painted on a metal drum, with the goal being to keep the car centered as the road shifts left and right.
Kasco introduced this type of driving game to Japan as Mini Drive in 1958. Capitol Projector's 1954 machine Auto Test was a driving test simulation that used film reel to project pre-recorded driving video footage, awarding the player points for making correct decisions as the footage is played. These early EM driving games consisted of only the player vehicle on the road, with no rival cars to race against. Arcade-style racing games put fun and a fast-paced experience above all else, as cars usually compete in unique ways. A key feature of arcade-style racers that specifically distinguishes them from simulation racers is their far more liberal physics. Collisions with other racers, track obstacles, or traffic vehicles is usually much more exaggerated than simulation racers as well.
For the most part, arcade-style racers simply remove the precision and rigor required from the simulation experience and focus strictly on the racing element itself. They often license real cars and leagues, but are equally open to more exotic settings and vehicles. Popular arcade-style racing franchises include Out Run, Ridge Racer, Daytona USA, Need for Speed, Sega Rally, Cruis'n, Burnout, Rush, Midnight Club, and MotorStorm. Art of Rally pays homage to rally racing history with gorgeous low-poly graphics and fulfilling gameplay. In Career mode, you begin with older 1960s rally cars like the Mini Cooper or BMW 2002 and compete up through the decades and at increasingly higher levels.
It's an indie title, and so the cars aren't licensed and only are only loosely based on rally's all-time greats, but it's obvious which car is an Audi Quattro S1 Group B racing car, and what's a Subaru WRX STi. In Free Roam mode, explore beautifully rendered hillsides, cities, and plains across a make-believe world, and take part in scavenger hunts to unlock more cars. Time trials are fun if you're looking to compete on specific stages and compare times on a global leaderboard. Art of Rally's simplicity helps bring out the details that matter in a racing game, the most obvious being a good time. There's no forced story with cheesy dialogue, and there's no giant advertisements plastered with car logos, so it's a breath of fresh air in terms of today's racing games.
It has a giant selection of cars and sharp details like glowing-hot brake rotors that allow players to pull the handbrake on the fun however they want. Since the mid-1980s, it became a trend for arcade racing games to use hydraulic motion simulator arcade cabinets. The trend was sparked by Sega's "taikan" games, with "taikan" meaning "body sensation" in Japanese. The "taikan" trend began when Yu Suzuki's team at Sega developed Hang-On , a racing video game where the player sits on and moves a motorbike replica to control the in-game actions. It used force feedback technology and was also one of the first arcade games to use 16-bit graphics and Sega's "Super Scaler" technology that allowed pseudo-3D sprite-scaling at high frame rates. Hang-On became the highest-grossing arcade game of 1986 in the United States, and one of the year's highest-grossing arcade games in Japan and London.
Taito's Laser Grand Prix, introduced in July 1983, was the first racing laserdisc game, using pre-recorded live-action footage. In 1984, several other racing laserdisc games followed, including Sega's GP World with live-action footage and Universal's Top Gear featuring 3D animated race car driving. The same year, Irem's The Battle-Road was a vehicle combat racing game with branching paths and up to 32 possible routes.
Geoff Crammond, who later developed the Grandprix series , produced what is considered the first attempt at a racing simulator on a home system, REVS, released for the BBC Microcomputer. The game offered an unofficial recreation of British Formula 3. The hardware capabilities limited the depth of the simulation and restricted it to one track, but it offered a semi-realistic driving experience with more detail than most other racing games at the time. Maybe you have the need for speed and want to push a vehicle to the edge of the speedometer. Perhaps you're looking for a cartoonish chase around the track.
Or maybe you want a realistic experience based off professional motorsports. Below, we've gathered up some of the best car racing games for kids and teens. These games cover drag racing, street racing, and off-road racing.
All of these are great games that present fun competition on a family game night. If you need more fuel-injected entertainment, check out our other lists to find the best car movies and racing game apps. NASCAR is one of the biggest racing championships around, but many racing games leave the stockcars behind in favor of other vehicles and more variety.
For NASCAR fans, there's only one great option and that's NASCAR Heat 5, the best stock car racing game and one of the better racing games on Xbox right now. NASCAR Heat 5 is the complete package for NASCAR fans, and features officially licensed real-world cars, teams, brands, and tracks, complete with a long career mode and plenty of options. The earliest rudimentary racing video game to be released dates back to 1972, with the release of the first video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey. It included a game called Wipeout, where the player moves a dot around a race track that is outlined by an overlay placed on the television screen. It required the use of physical items to play, including a race game board, screen overlay, car tokens and pit stop cards.
In 1973, Atari released Space Race, an arcade video game where players control spaceships that race against opposing ships, while avoiding comets and meteors. It is a competitive two-player game with black and white graphics and controlled with a two-way joystick. The following year, Atari released the first driving video game in the arcades, Gran Trak 10, which presents an overhead single-screen view of the track in low resolution white-on-black graphics. It inspired the Kee Games clone Formula K, which sold 5,000 arcade cabinets.
Forza Horizon 4 is an open-world arcade racer with simulation elements, so it's far from the most realistic racer on this list. Still, you have a fantastic array of customization options to make your car look and perform exactly the way you want, and there's a decent set of tuning tools to give you that extra edge in a race. FH4 is also consistent, so it's easy for even novice racing fans to get into, and provides a ridiculous amount of freedom to play the way you want. Something about Forza Horizon games and their expansive open-worlds even draws in players that normally wouldn't touch racing games. Using the same formula as the first two games—just bigger and better—Forza Horizon 3 lets players speed around a jaw-droppingly beautiful version of Australia in a list of cars that puts the old Gran Turismo games to shame.
Even if the handling doesn't satisfy the purist (and/or masochist) in you, there's no other car game out there currently with such a strong emphasis on having fun. The game has also expanded to give off-road racing a fair shake, something that we don't see often in video games apart from rallying. Apart from the 8-player Daytona USA arcade setup, it's also probably the most communal game on the list, with a strong emphasis on multiplayer racing and an "Online Adventure" mode for free-roaming with friends. Maybe that's why it's become one of the highest-grossing arcade games of all time. In 1997, Gran Turismo was released for the PlayStation, after being in production for five years since 1992.
It was considered the most realistic racing simulation game in its time, combined with playability, enabling players of all skill levels to play. It offered a wealth of meticulous tuning options and introduced an open-ended career mode where players had to undertake driving tests to acquire driving licenses, earn their way into races and choose their own career path. The Gran Turismo series has since become the second-most successful racing game franchise of all time, selling over 80 million units worldwide as of April 2018.
You can gather a few friends and play any Mario Kart game, right back to the 1992 Super Nintendo original, and be guaranteed a good time. Every game in the series boasts refined arcade handling, tricksy courses, a lovable cast of characters and a capricious cruel streak that can turn any race on its head. Even though Forza and Gran Turismo steal the simulation spotlight on the regular, we're now living in something of a golden age of super-realistic car games. Both Project Cars and Assetto Corsa started out as niche PC products and graduated to consoles on the strength of their popularity, and both can be an unforgiving, no-holds-barred experience. One of the last successful electro-mechanical arcade games was F-1, a racing game developed and released by Namco in 1976, and distributed in North America by Atari the same year.
The gameplay is viewed from the perspective of the driver's viewpoint, which is displayed on the screen using a projector system. It was Japan's highest-grossing arcade game for two years in a row, in 1976 and 1977. F-1 is believed to have been influenced by Indy 500, and would in turn be influential on Namco's racing video games in the 1980s. Simulation style racing games strive to convincingly replicate the handling of an automobile. They often license real cars or racing leagues, but will sometimes use fantasy cars built to resemble real ones if unable to acquire an official license for them.
Vehicular behavior physics are a key factor in the experience. The rigors of being a professional race driver are usually also included (such as having to deal with a car's tire condition and fuel level). Proper cornering technique and precision racing maneuvers are given priority in the simulation racing games.
There's even half-decent AI to race against if you don't fancy the cut and thrust of online play. A rather successful sequel, then, and better yet the developers are working on a Fast & Furious game. It's entirely possible that the upcoming Forza 7 will take its place as the best car racing game ever made, but until then, it's safe to say that Forza Motorsport 4 reigns supreme. It struck the perfect balance between difficult and accessible, able to challenge both hardcore simulation fans and draw in people just looking for a fun pick-up-and-drive experience.
We're tried to filter out influential icons whose pioneering ways have since been copied and perfected by others, and stick with racing games that can still be easily found on either the current generation of consoles or online. What we're left with, then, are ten entries that stand head and shoulders above the rest—be it through graphics, content, or gameplay—in such a way that creates an unrivaled, unrepeatable experience in car racing games. Video games take the difficult, and oftentimes the impossible, and turn them into reality. With the advent of virtual reality , next-gen graphics, and online multiplayer options, the gaming world offers a digital equivalent to nearly every hobby.
And while we'd prefer to spend our time behind the wheel of a real car, sometimes that's just not possible. Their newest game follows the aptly named F and delivers a mostly familiar Formula One racing experience with better visuals and customization than ever before. F even includes a full-fledged campaign mode that will likely keep players interested and engaged for hours to come, even if it likely won't win any rewards for storytelling. If you love the idea of driving a formula race car in any sense, there's seriously no better option than the officially licensed F1 series, and the best of the bunch is F1 2021.
When GT Sport launched with a limited car list and only a vestigal single player mode back in late 2017, everyone questioned whether Gran Turismo series creator Kazunori Yamauchi had finally lost his touch. It turns out, though, it was his way of gently forcing players towards an online racing ecosystem that took real motorsport as its inspiration. Then once everyone was indoctrinated into the cult of daily online races, he went and added more cars and a career mode too, the wag. Whether you're looking for a race against the clock in single player mode, or want to show off your driving skills in a high-stakes multiplayer game, EA has you covered. Shift into high gear and elude pursuit in the heart-pounding Need for Speed™ series or jump into the driver's seat to take on some of the world's best racers in the Formula 1® franchise. Push the limits anytime, anywhere with EA's best racing games.
At the time of this writing,Steamhas more than 18 pages devoted to competitive driving (that's not factoring in racing games from other game stores). Granted, some of the listed titles most certainly arenotracing games. For example,Rocket Leaguefeatures wheeled vehicles literally speeding toward a goal, but it is unquestionably a sports game . Likewise, EmergeNYC, a simulation game in which you jump into the shoes of the NYPD, FDNY, or EMS and attempt to save lives, is not a racing game.
When you actually get to the finish, though, you feel a sense of accomplishment that's hard to find elsewhere. This video of pro rally driver Will Orders giving Dirt Rally a go in a simulator rig shows how the game's myriad tuning options and control settings combine for unrivaled realism in the world of rally racing games. Ask almost anyone between the ages of 25 and 40 what their favorite racing game was when they were younger, and chances are you'll get something from the iconic Gran Turismo series.
The first Gran Turismo game on the original PlayStation is rightly lionized for popularizing the car simulator genre, borrowing the idea of real-world cars from series like Need for Speed and dialing the realism up to 11. It went on to become the best-selling PS1 game of all time, but its graphics and gameplay haven't quite aged as well as other games from that era. Forza isn't the only racing game series that's going back to basics, because the next Gran Turismo will also be a more old-school affair. Unlike the online racing-focused Gran Turismo Sport, Gran Turismo 7 will offer a more traditional gameplay experience, with features like a from-rags-to-riches career mode and used car dealerships being familiar to long-time GT fans. Expect Gran Turismo 7 to launch next year, exclusively on the new PlayStation 5. The present studies investigated why video racing games increase players' risk-taking inclinations.
Study 1 ruled out the role of experimental demand in creating such effects. Studies 2 and 3 showed that the effect of playing video racing games on risk taking was partially mediated by changes in self-perceptions as a reckless driver. In sum, the results underline the potential negative impact of racing games on traffic safety. The Burnout series of racing games made a splash among console racing game enthusiasts in 2008.
The games are set in an open world racing environment; a freer, more arcade-type racing experience where, as players, you can explore the huge, fictional Paradise City at your own pace. Here you can take on achievement/mission goals in various modes that can be creatively achieved anywhere on the map. Its 3D polygon graphics stood out for the use of Gouraud shading and texture mapping.
Sega later released Daytona USA, which featured 3D polygon graphics with texture filtering. The following year, Electronic Arts produced The Need for Speed, which would later spawn the world's most successful racing game series and one of the most successful video game series. On the other end of the spectrum, Sega produced Virtua Racing in 1992. It improved on earlier 3D racing games with more complex 3D models and backdrops, higher frame rate, and switchable camera angles including chase-cam and first-person views. IGN considers it the third most influential racing game of all time.
In 1977, Atari released Super Bug, a racing game historically significant as "the first game to feature a scrolling playfield" in multiple directions. In 1980, Namco's overhead-view driving game Rally-X was one of the first games to have background music, and allowed scrolling in multiple directions, both vertical and horizontal. It also uses a radar, to show the rally car's location on the map. Racing games are a video game genre in which the player participates in a racing competition. They may be based on anything from real-world racing leagues to fantastical settings. They are distributed along a spectrum between more realistic racing simulations and more fantastical arcade-style racing games.
