Pars Ludum: Hi, Daddy Racing!

Gamers will have no problem identifying the picture. Even those who do not play often, must have heard of this particular game. For the complete newbies, these screenshots are taken from the internationally acclaimed game "ROAD RASH". What this game is, is the father of all bike racing games and probably racing games. Many children will remember enjoying beating up the police officers, or rushing through beautiful landscape(or as beautiful the landscape could be made due to backward graphics), or even trying to run over the lady who would wave the flag to signal the start of the race.

This game was released on 6 different console versions, through the years 1991 to 1999. Having backward graphics was not a problem, since at that point in the timeline of historical events, having a video game to play was unique enough. So yes, many people have played this game. Yet most do not know the significance of this game. This game was purposefully made to make a difference on the gaming platform. Unlike games before, this game improvised on the Hang-On concept, that is turning the vehicle by pressing left and right arrow keys, by making the player move through various grade changes. Although the graphics was not masterfully displayed, the general idea was presented and later built on by modern game developers.

The general gameplay was that of illegal street bike races. The races would be held in 6 different environments depicting California State Routes

Sierra Nevada
Pacific Coast
Redwood Forest
Palm Desert
Grass valley

The game is based on gradient feel and obstacle based racing. The stationary obstacles include lamp posts, trees, mailboxes, water pumps etc. Among moving obstacles are the traffic cars, and the highest levels, police bikes. Players can use assorted weapons to beat other bikers and police bikers. However the bikers can attack back at you. The more you race, the more difficult the police bikers get. Your ultimate goal, though remains same. Win the race. Even if you rank second, the video will show the winner go away with the award and the girls in a convertible car leaving you to bite the dust.

This game launched all our friends to launch into contests of who was a better racer (as if racing on the computer was even close to racing in real life). However at that point of time, this game was a REALLY big deal.

The more experiment-oriented minds (like moi!) however did not stop there. During every race, we would see the landscape pass by. We just HAD to ruin our game by trying to find out what would happen if we leave the road. So one fine day, I decided to finally let my fellow racers win, and moved diagonally. Thus I reached the hills and drove to the peak. Now this scene reminded me of the song, "Aaj mein upar, asmaan niche"!!

However, since even in the all-famous game IGI, the dead body would be inside the hill waist-down, none of us minded so much as long as severe glitches did not show up during races. We all soon got pretty good at racing with top level bikers. Unfortunately most of us were not aware that driving bikes like that would be illegal and thus our heart broke when parents had "The Talk" with us. Oh, I don't mean that kind of talk! I meant the speech that you should play games less because it doesn't exactly match with the real world. Anyway, as history of games go, this game is the place to start!