The same could be said of the criminally underrated Star Wars Pod Racer. Seldom is a single set piece from a film able to create such a strong concept for a game. Hurtling through the Star Wars universe and fixing exploding pods as you travel were rare experiences, and a wealth of ideas were once again lost to the churn of videogame fashions.
These few experiments represent the suffocated spirit of experimentation within fantastical adventure games, and their like should be encouraged without reserve. They offer a portal into an alternate world, where Wipeout had not smothered the category and science fiction racing had been the most vital and inventive of game genres.
And so we racers lament the passing of a genre. There has been no great future racer for five years, and there are none on the horizon. From my perspective, as a burned-out, disillusioned sci-fi speedster sifting through a collection of not quite classics, I can see that what the next generation of consoles needs is a future racing revolution. We can't afford to lose this iconic genre, but it also has to change, to shed a skin that is hardening into a death mask. It needs to be faster, brighter and more fashionable than anything that has gone before. But it also needs to not look to Wipeout for validation, and should seek out the ideas of other genres for new and exciting angles on getting around a racetrack at high speed.
For that next futuristic racer, the one to replace Wipeout in those exciting video-montages, we need some of that reality bending that games are getting so good at: portal racing, or teleporting rocket-ships, or a racing game that does for racing what Steel Battalion did for giant robots - giving us an absurd peripheral around which to base our playful speeding antics might not make financial sense, but damn, it'd be fun. Or more practically, what about a future racer that threw even more conventions out of the window and ended up being something like Test Drive Unlimited, an online future city were impromptu street-racing events were the lifeblood of a persistent racing persona? Or what about a different kind of future -a decent post-apocalyptic racer in the dust storms of Australia, or a simulation based on telekinetic engineering? What about survival/horror racing, where outrunning the undead is all you can do to stay alive? (Surely a racing game can be scary, too?) Something, anything, just make it fast.
Science fiction speed-freaks as yet unimagined, we salute you.
Jim Rossignol is a writer and editor based in the South West of England. He writes about videogames, fiction and science.
