Remembering classic games: Badlands (1989)

It's not often racing videogames tackle the bleak possibility of nuclear apocalypse; the closest thing we've got to a weapon of mass destruction is usually the blue shell in Mario Kart. In 1989, though, Atari took the popular top-down racing formula of its more conventional arcade game Championship Sprint and dumped in a liberal helping of Mad Max chaos. Badlands was born.

Badlands pitched three armoured cars against each other in a series of eight increasingly grim and gritty circuits, starting in an abandoned city and ending by slithering around a gutted junkyard. Every snaking track was entirely contained within a single screen, with shortcuts, hazards and some remarkably evocative artwork considering it had fewer pixels to play with than your smartwatch.  And all this to the backing of a squelchy yet ominous 16-bit sci-fi soundtrack.

There were a few more strategic options than in the sanitised world Championship Sprint, too. For a start there's the Howitzer strapped to the roof of your car on the title screen, though in practice it's a disappointing peashooter that only serves to slow down your opponents rather than turn them into a shower of metal confetti. You're better off tactically colliding with destructible elements of the scenery, toppling water towers into the path of the other racers to slow them down or clattering a refinery storage tank and spilling gallons of slippery crude across the track surface.

With Formula One in a seemingly endless state of existential crisis, it's reassuring that in Badlands' dystopian vision of the future, even after the literal end of the world, motorsport survives in some form. If this is the entertainment we're left with as we tuck into our Sunday lunch of rat on a stick, we'll gladly take it.