Remembering classic games: Fatal Racing (1995)

In the early 1990s, the name Gremlin Graphics was synonymous with 2D arcade racing. With a catalogue that included Lotus Turbo Challenge, Super Cars and Nigel Mansell’s World Championship Racing, this small Sheffield studio dished out more hits than a prizefighter.

While Gremlin never enjoyed the same success in the 3D era, 1995 PC game Fatal Racing had an undeniable charm. Although the theme was deadly competition in the near future, with its luridly decorated saloon cars, tight handling and host of fictional sponsors, this played a bit like TOCA Touring Cars, only with more homicide. Well, unless you let the rivalry with Jason Plato get really out of hand.

Circuits were treacherous, stunt-filled affairs and your race was just as likely to be ended by falling off a corkscrew section as colliding with another driver. In a neat, potentially copyright infringing touch, all the computer controlled drivers were named after AIs and robots from science fiction, making it possible to be run off the road by Red Dwarf's angular headed android Krypton.

While calling the opponents smart would be a stretch, they do display an otherwise uniquely human trait. Fatal Racing's AI drivers finally do what we've been doing for years in driving games: get bored and start driving backwards, trying to crash into oncoming racers. If you tired of getting ploughed into by HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the game also supported up to 16 players over a local network, which at the time was extremely rare.

Fatal Racing was only modestly popular in its day, which may be why it was rebranded and called Whiplash in America. While at first glance that may appear to be a more dramatic title, we'd like to point out that whiplash is generally a significantly less serious condition than a fatality. If anything, to our mind, it's actually a downgrade.