Remembering classic games: 1000 Miglia (1994)

Nowadays the Mille Miglia road race is essentially a driving holiday for investment bankers and the odd celebrity chef. Back in the race's 50s and 60s heyday, though, it was a breakneck lap of Italy on public roads, cutting through rolling countryside and blasting through provincial towns frightening the locals. It's exactly that lunacy that the 1994 game 1000 Miglia: Great 1000 Miles Rally sought to recreate, albeit crunched down into an isometric arcade racer.

The game's toybox selection of 10 cars was ripped straight from decades of the race's history, including Stirling Moss' iconic 722 Mercedes 300 SLR, and each was blessed with a remarkably throaty engine note and the ability to shoot a five foot sheet of flame from the exhaust. Your grand tour started with you slithering around the cobbled streets of Brescia attempting to manage pixel-perfect powerslides without colliding with any of a seemingly endless stream of ponderously slow competitors. Each stage that followed represented a leg of the real route to Rome and back, though you could wrap the entire thing up in 10 minutes as opposed to 10 gruelling hours.

Like fellow arcade classic World Rally from the year before, a stage was a 60 second point-to-point dash and the fixed perspective gave you only a split second to react to any upcoming obstacle, be that a hairpin turn, a tight chicane or a trundling 1931 Alfa Romeo 8C 2300 Monza. This game also shared the same satisfying, drifty handling as World Rally and you laid down pleasing black tyre marks at every corner. Successfully complete the game and you'll have left the previously idyllic Italian countryside looking like a broken Etch-a-Sketch.

Much of the charm came from the fact that it tackled an era of motorsport that is sorely under-represented in racing games. Crucially 1000 Miglia’s period setting gives you the opportunity to drive a Ferrari 250 GTO exactly how it was meant to be driven; with zero knowledge that it will eventually be worth 70 million dollars.