Most racing games are remarkably straightforward affairs, like any other type of simulation. You tend to know what you’re getting into before you even start, and save for those rare cases of false advertising , there’s little to surprise you.
But any game can be weird, and that holds true for those that involve driving, too. There are plenty of head-scratching racers out there — more than we could reasonably include in one list. So we’ve rounded up a neat 10 of them, running the gamut from missions-based vehicular action to racing-themed RPGs and one where you just run. Some of these are relatively well-known, but others deserve a bit more notoriety than they’ve received over the years. Let’s give them some love, shall we?
You can credit the idea for this piece to Konami’s Thrill Drive, a series of arcade-exclusive racers that released between 1998 and 2007. Thrill Drive has been cited as one of the inspirations behind the original Burnout; comparing footage of both, the resemblance is immediately clear.
The big difference between the two is that while Burnout goes so far as to omit human drivers from crashes entirely to satisfy an E-for-Everyone rating and keep players from getting too depressed, Thrill Drive does not fuck around. The game both prods you, teases you to go even faster and terrorizes you with screams and ominous music when you crash. Also, your vehicle’s driver will regularly be flung out of the car in such instances, as the word “FATALITY” flashes across the screen. Thrill Drive’s tone is weird — the game seems to dangle death and destruction as an allure for players, but also expresses some desire to educate its audience about road safety. I don’t know what to make of it, but god do I want to play it.
The original PlayStation had plenty of futuristic racing games, but Running High, released only in Japan in 1997 and developed by a studio named System Sacom, is a little different from the rest. For one it doesn’t contain cars or machines that hover, like Wipeout . In fact, it didn’t include vehicles at all.
Rather, in Running High you control humans propelled by the power of their own legs, enhanced by cybernetic suits. It’s not terribly different than Sonic R on the Sega Saturn in that way, in which you “drive” the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog, a guy known for running very fast. Except Running High is weirder, because it can’t lean on beloved characters to justify its existence. Thankfully there’s music while you race, to cover the incessant pitter-patter of all those footsteps .
Rather than tell you anything about Climax’s Runabout, the mission-based driving game known as Felony 11-79 in the U.S., it’s probably best if I just share the game’s intro text crawl:
In the late sixteenth century, archaeologist Thomas Samuel discovered the route to a previously unexplored City of Gold. There he found vast amounts of treasure and caskets buried in the ground which contained gems, gold bars and the corpses of ancient kings. But, there was one casket that could not be opened. Eventually, the casket was purchased at an auction by the entrepreneur Albert Brookmond IV for two million dollars. His late grandfather’s writings described a set of keys that would open the casket. Treasures valuing many millions of dollars lie hidden in this casket. There are three keys: the Jade Statue, the Golden Wing and Silver Staff. All three keys are required to open the casket. To find the keys, Mr. Brookmond hired a man feared in the business world for his characteristics of ruthless pursuit and disregard for the law.
There were a few more entries in the Runabout series after this, and it would only get weirder .
You likely know Choro Q as a line of toy cars created by Tomy. It also happens to be a video game series going back several decades, though that’s easy to miss here in the States, where every other installment seemed to go by a different title.
While the early Choro Qs were pretty much run-of-the-mill arcade racers, 2002's Road Trip Adventure — a.k.a. Choro Q HG 2 — had a full story mode, with cars as characters. In fact, in the world of Choro Q humans don’t exist and cars are sentient, leading rich lives full of intrapersonal drama. At the end of the game you race President Forest — the green sedan above that resembles a cross between a Lincoln Continental and Toyota Century — for his job. Then all your car friends salute you as their new leader.
Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors, the unreleased Sega CD title starring the comedy magic duo, isn’t strictly a racing game. However, it does contain a minigame, titled Desert Bus, where the player must drive a bus with no passengers from Tucson to Las Vegas in real time, in zero traffic. That will take you about eight hours. Eight hours of driving on a perpetually straight highway, at a max speed of 45 mph, in a bus that veers ever so slightly to the right so you can’t just cheat by keeping the accelerator button pinned the whole time. You can’t ever pause the game, either, and the whole thing effectively ends should you veer off road. Those patient enough to make it to their destination are presented with the option of a return trip, but must agree to it within 12 seconds.
Most of the titles on this list are on the older side, but 2016's My Summer Car reminds us that it’s still very much possible to make a weird game involving cars, driving or, broadly speaking, transportation. According to the developer Johannes Rojola, My Summer Car is “the ultimate car owning, building, fixing, tuning, maintenance AND permadeath life survival simulator.” It takes place during “everlasting Finnish summer” and is crushingly real. “Small error and you die,” the website reads. “It could be that you forgot to tighten brake linings, or that you forgot to bolt wheels properly.” Fortunately, Rojola recently announced a sequel : My Winter Car.
Strictly speaking, Hang-On GP ’95 is not the weirdest game on this list. It’s a mostly featureless motorcycle racing game that came out early in the Sega Saturn’s lifespan and features nothing in common with Yu Suzuki’s Hang-On or Super Hang-On. Those were lovely, genre-defining experiences, but Hang-On GP, developed by Genki, simply feels off.
It looks terrible, the bikes and riders move in an extremely unnatural, rigid way and the engine noises are probably the worst I’ve ever heard. And sure — being bad shouldn’t be confused with being weird, but sometimes a game manages to underwhelm in just the right way that it becomes vaguely unsettling, albeit not for any obvious, attributable reason. A few years after this one, Sega released a port of Manx TT Superbike on the Saturn — a motorcycle racer so good, it basically invalidated Hang-On GP’s entire existence. It also let you race on a sheep , which was pretty weird in a different way.
Square’s RPG-street-racer hybrid is unusual in concept, but probably much stranger in its narrative. The over-the-top characters and confounding dialogue and writing establish a feeling that something just isn’t right from the jump, but the plot thickens the more you discover about WON-TEC — the game’s shadowy, corporate presence — and the protagonist’s relationship to it. Put another way, it’s peak Square of the ’90s; it just so happens to be framed in the world of illegal street racing.
The thing about Daytona USA is it’s a weird game, with a weird soundtrack and a weird premise, weird visuals and weird cars — but that’s not what it’s really known for. It’s known for being the arcade game you and your drunk friends always make time for at the Barcade. But if you take a step back, Daytona USA is really fucking strange. It’s about drifting stock cars with tires extending a full foot out the sides, to the sound of a man yelling. And we all just accept it!
Even weirder than the original Daytona, though, is Daytona USA 2001. Developed by Genki just like Hang-On GP, Daytona 2001 leans into all of the series’ quirks and compounds them with a goofy announcer, overly touchy steering and cars like the Messerschmidt KR200 -inspired Pywackett Barchetta, which happens to be driven by aliens. There’s also the Rule of the 9th, seen in the video above, piloted by some sort of terrifying non-Euclidean figure with an icon of an eye for a head. This was a game inspired by NASCAR.
I’ll admit, I’ve never played Jimmie Johnson’s foray into the world of interactive entertainment, but I respect it. The game tells you what it’s about, right there in the title. And even though the name leaves things quite open-ended — we’re talking anything with an engine, truly — the result is even stranger than you could imagine.
This is basically a glorified kart racer, couched in zany characters and zanier vehicles, like V8-powered reclining sofa chairs and cement mixers. Of course, the man himself makes many appearances — with full voice acting, no less. That seems to be where the budget ran out, though, because the story cutscenes play out as slideshows, with static, unanimated computer-generated representations of Jimmie and his made-up friends. Look for it on a future Jalopnik stream, as soon as I manage to source a copy.
Those are 10 of our picks for the weirdest driving games ever made, but we’re just scratching the tip of the iceberg here. What else deserves a mention? Let us know in the comments.