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The history of racing games dates back decades, all the way to the earliest origins of video games. Always quick to squeeze every ounce of performance from any given platform, racing games are regularly at the tip of the spear when it comes to technological leaps.
From top down to takedowns and Byron Bay to Colin McRae, there have been hundreds of top quality racing games released over the years featuring just about every type of machine you can strap an engine to and point towards a finish line. However, we’ve narrowed down a list of our favourites to what we believe are the very best racing games of all time.
The following 25 games represent a broad spectrum of racing sub-genres and are plucked from several decades of video game history, so the final mix is a fusion of influential greats, seismic smash hits, and series-best instalments. We’ve curated it with a maximum of one game per franchise in mind to ease up on repetition, so keep that in mind if some popular series below seem limited to a single heavy-hitter.
It doesn’t matter whether you win by an inch or a mile; these are the greatest racing games ever.
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"This next one's off our new album 'More Like World of BoreCraft', one, two, three..."[/caption]
HOUSE REAL BIG. CARS REAL BIG. BELLY REAL BIG. EVERYTHING REAL BIG.[/caption]
25: Rock n’ Roll Racing (1993)
A memorable isometric battle racer, Rock n’ Roll Racing owes a good deal to some key trailblazers before it, including Rare’s highly-successful 1988 NES smash-hit R.C. Pro-Am and EA’s earlier Commodore 64 game Racing Destruction Set from 1985. In fact, Rock n’ Roll Racing developer Silicon & Synapse was actually behind the 1991 SNES remake of Racing Destruction Set, dubbed RPM Racing (or Radical Psycho Machine Racing, according to the box art, proving that some hastily-scrawled napkin notes really need to be left at the bar after closing time). After Super Mario Kart launched in 1992 and sucked all the jam out of RPM Racing’s doughnut, Silicon & Synapse repurposed its remains into Rock n’ Roll Racing. The result was a racer high on ’90s attitude yet powered by your old man’s record collection, as your TV bleeped and blooped through Born to be Wild, Bad to the Bone, and Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, amongst others. Silicon & Synapse subsequently changed its name to Blizzard and has spent the last 25 years releasing games with little discernible rock n’ roll and a distinct lack of racing. Despite this, upon closer inspection, the studio appears to have enjoyed some success. [caption id="attachment_2384056" align="aligncenter" width="1920"] "This next one's off our new album 'More Like World of BoreCraft', one, two, three..."[/caption]
24: Wreckfest (2018)
Who’s the demigod of destruction racers? The PlayStation classic Destruction Derby, perhaps? The oft-forgotten and criminally-underrated Driven to Destruction (also known as Test Drive: Eve of Destruction)? Or maybe it’s the fan-fave FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage? Well, Wreckfest is the culmination of all of those: a magical mix of jalopy jumping, rubber ripping, metal-rending mayhem. With Wreckfest, car smashing specialists Bugbear recaptured the door-slamming spirit of its original FlatOut games and brought it back to life inside the best demolition derby game in over a decade. The presentation is a little staid but the elbows-out competition on track is anything but, and the handling is tuned to a T. Hulking American muscle cars and land yachts squat back on their worn springs and need to be wrestled into heroic Hollywood powerslides and steered on the throttle. Smaller European and Japanese models are nimbler but they’re also lighter and require a little more finesse to manhandle around the track. And then there’s the special vehicles: school buses, RVs, lawn mowers, and even a motorised couch. Better still, just about every panel and part on them can be punished, pulverised, or simply prised off completely. Time will tell if Wreckfest’s reputation can last as long as its forebears but, for now, it’s certainly the best destruction derby game on four wheels (when they’re all attached, that is). [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2019/08/23/wreckfest-review"]23: Wave Race 64 (1996)
What’s a list of radical racing games if you don’t get a little wet? Spearheaded by some of Nintendo’s most distinguished developers, including Shinya Takahashi, Katsuya Eguchi, and Shigeru Miyamoto, Wave Race 64 was the first racing game for the Nintendo 64. It was a little short but it made a big splash on account of its thoroughly convincingly water physics – the likes of which were more or less unparalleled at the time. The dynamic nature of race courses affected by sloshing swell made for a highly-engaging racing experience, in which you were constantly reading the waves and using the game's impressive physics to ride or launch off them. It was completely different from the static circuits gamers were used to. Nintendo made a single follow-up – Wave Race: Blue Storm for GameCube in 2001 – but the series has been basically submerged for almost two decades now. [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=The%20series%20has%20been%20basically%20submerged%20for%20almost%20two%20decades%20now"]Motocross Madness developers Rainbow Studios released a pretty damn great PlayStation and Xbox equivalent in 2001 called Splashdown – which switched the jet skis for Sea-Doos – but it’s telling that after nearly 20 years, Nintendo’s Wave Race 64 still rules the tides.22: Hard Drivin’ (1989)
The stunt racer has a long history and there are plenty of prized examples dating all the way back to the ’80s. Looking back at some of stunt racing’s heavyweight champions, there’s a trio of truly trendsetting stunt racers that are actually quite hard to split. In the red corner there’s Atari’s incredible Hard Drivin' arcade cabinet, which featured a clutch and a manual shifter like no other game at the time (though the home release ports tended to have frame rates you could count on one hand and the Commodore 64 version was particularly horrific). In the blue corner? Geoff Crammond’s highly-acclaimed and physics-heavy Stunt Car Racer for Amiga and a variety of other platforms (released as Stunt Track Racer in the US). The third? Well, waiting in the parking lot to sucker punch the winner and scurry away is Distinctive Software’s derivative but very popular Stunts from 1990, which in most ways is admittedly an unashamed (albeit superior) rip-off of Hard Drivin’ with one key bonus: its amazing track editor. [poilib element="quoteBox" parameters="excerpt=%5BHard%20Drivin's%5D%20wild%20loops%20and%20cutting-edge%20polygonal%20graphics%20were%20like%20nothing%20gamers%20had%20seen%20before"]Plenty of stunt racers have followed over the years – from Gremlin’s Fatal Racing (dubbed Whiplash in the US) to Reflection’s super-tricky Stuntman, and the long-running Trackmania series – but we’ll give the belt to Hard Drivin’ here, because its wild loops and cutting-edge polygonal graphics were like nothing gamers had seen before.21: Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition (2006)
California’s Angel Studios (which became Rockstar San Diego in 2002) deserves a stack of credit for being a pioneer of open world racing; after all, the studio created the Midtown Madness, Smuggler's Run, and Midnight Club series. Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition was the first time the series would feature licensed cars, however, and its array of vehicles was almost as diverse as its killer soundtrack. More than that, though, its gameplay was rough, rugged, and thrilling; DUB Edition had a superb sense of speed as you gunned towards the next smoke-signal checkpoint, flinging your car sideways around corners as you fanged through the dense traffic of the game’s three sprawling cities. Special abilities distinguished it further, letting you barge cars out of the way or thread the needle through tricky traffic in slow-motion, while extensive, delightfully bling customisation options were the icing on a cake like no other. No wonder Midnight Club 3 is regarded as one of the top racers of the PS2 and original Xbox era. [caption id="attachment_2384122" align="aligncenter" width="4535"] HOUSE REAL BIG. CARS REAL BIG. BELLY REAL BIG. EVERYTHING REAL BIG.[/caption]