Enduro

Enduro is an Activision racing game written by Larry Miller for the Atari 2600 in 1983. It reached the ZX Spectrum later as a conversion, so what you play here is a port rather than the original release. The principle survived intact and it is remarkably simple: you sit behind the wheel, the road rushes at you and your only job is to overtake.

Everything rests on a daily quota. On the first day you must pass two hundred cars, on every following day three hundred. Make it and you keep driving, miss it and you are done. Nobody is timing you; what chases you is the number of cars still ahead, and that is the crucial difference from ordinary races of the period. There is no point risking a crash to save seconds, but you also cannot afford to sit behind a slow car for long.

The best idea in the game is the changing conditions. The day passes, the sky darkens, and at night you see only the tail lights of the cars in front, so you steer by two glowing dots. Then comes fog that cuts your view to almost nothing, and ice on which the car answers the controls late. A foggy or icy stretch can wreck a good day, because you still have to keep overtaking, only now nearly blind.

It is a game built on repetition, and its charm lies in how long a run you can squeeze out of two directions and an accelerator. It is also true that after a few days the cycle stops changing and you are playing for score and stamina. If you expect tracks and rivals you will be disappointed. If you like a clean skill loop, you will stay longer than you planned.

On oldgame.cz Enduro starts straight in your browser, with nothing to install.