Remembering classic games: Quarantine (1994)

There have been plenty of games that offered you the opportunity to ply your trade as a humble cabbie, Crazy Taxi for example, or the Grand Theft Auto series, for those people who don’t fancy doing any of the hundreds of more interesting activities in that game. None of those games, however, ask you to somehow scratch out a living ferrying passengers around in a sealed off, psychopath riddled prison city in the distant, dystopian future. And you thought being an Uber driver on a Friday night was a thankless job.

Quarantine was a, usually quite literal, collision between Crazy Taxi and iconic first person shooter game Doom, which had debuted only a year beforehand. The floaty handling of the game was explained away by the fact that your vehicle was actually a hovercar and your task was to pick up your fares and deposit them with all their limbs intact at their chosen destination.

This was an objective made slightly more complicated by the fact that every other road user and pedestrian was attempting to murder you. To aid you in your survival, your yellow cab was positively festooned with military grade ordnance, most notably a giant, roof mounted chain gun of the variety you’d more commonly see dangling beneath an Apache helicopter.

Played almost entirely for laughs, the game was spectacularly violent and naturally any pedestrians unfortunate enough to wander in front of your taxi would end up splashed across your windscreen. If you had a particularly troublesome fare, you could simply tap the E button on the keyboard to eject them from the car.

Quarantine imagined a world where being a taxi driver was a brutal, dangerous profession, where every fare involved taking your life in your hands, but it’s still probably better than picking bits of sick out the back seat at the end of your shift...