Deathtrack

I remember that moment when I first saw an opponent's car scattered into scrap metal on the straightaway near Cleveland. Not from a crash — from a rocket. That's when it hit me: Deathtrack isn't a racing game in the conventional sense.

Dynamix released it in 1989 on DOS and defined the genre simply: you race, but at the same time you're trying to survive. The setting is a dystopian future America where road races are a deadly sport — literally. Your opponents have weapons, you have weapons, and the goal is to reach the finish line first, or as the only one alive. A combination of racer and shooter that wasn't a given back then.

The game offers vehicle selection, upgrades, and weapon purchases before each race. You earn money from placement and eliminating opponents, so an aggressive style pays off. The races themselves are seen from behind the car, pseudo-3D scrolling with solid graphics for 1989. Controls are straightforward — steer, shoot, evade. The physics lean more arcade than simulation, but nobody complained. Difficulty scales nicely, and later opponents will simply tear you apart without better equipment.

What Deathtrack brought was atmosphere. Music on PC Speaker or Sound Blaster did its best, and that feeling of a gritty, cynical future world was surprisingly consistent. The game hasn't aged poorly in the sense that the core loop — race, earn, upgrade, survive — still works. What's aged worse is the visuals: pseudo-3D was impressive then, but today it looks like a pretty wild fever dream of a racing game. And the controls take a while to adjust to again after thirty years.

Today it hits especially those looking for a racing game with some bite — not a simulator, but not pure arcade either. If you enjoy era-appropriate arcade races with destruction and a touch of garage strategy, Deathtrack is three-quarters of an hour of pure joy from a time when PC games didn't have manuals to read on your break, but threw you straight into the track. It runs in your browser without issues, and that's really the only setup you need.