5th Gear is a 1988 driving action game for the Commodore Amiga, published by Britain's Hewson Consultants. The name, a nod to top gear, states the intent plainly: fast car action in the arcade tradition, with no simulation ambitions attached.

It is a single-player game. Hewson held a particular reputation on the British scene as a publisher of technically polished software; the company prided itself on smoothness and craftsmanship, precisely the qualities games on the young Amiga wanted to show off.

In 1988 the Amiga was still gathering momentum. The machine's superb graphics and sound chipset was ahead of its game library, and driving titles were favourite demonstrations of its muscle, since speed and colour register instantly with anyone watching. At the same time, the market still ran heavily on conversions from the 8-bit machines and on games built for several platforms at once.

Seen from today, 5th Gear samples a transitional era of the European industry: the moment when British publishers raised on the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64 were finding their way to a 16-bit audience and learning what the new hardware could carry.

The 16-bit market grew around magazines whose reviews and cover-disk demos decided commercial fates. Smaller titles like this one competed on price and instant playability rather than budgets, and it was precisely this middle layer that kept the platform's library alive and varied.

The game's card on OldGame.cz captures the release year, the Hewson imprint and screenshots from the track.