Advanced Road Rage Simulator

Advanced Road Rage Simulator is a 1997 entry to CSSCGC — the annual comp.sys.sinclair competition for the worst ZX Spectrum game of the year. Its full title is Advanced Road Rage Simulator - M4 Joyrider Edition and databases file it as a racing game.

The joke lives entirely in the title and what it points at. In the late eighties the British market was flooded with budget releases from Codemasters carrying the word simulator — Pro Powerboat Simulator, BMX Simulator, Advanced Pilot Simulator and dozens more — all of which sounded technical while being simple arcade games. Prefixing a title with Advanced was itself a marketing gesture used to justify releasing a nearly identical game again. CSSCGC entries mocked that tradition systematically, and this is one of them.

The M4 Joyrider subtitle refers to the British M4 motorway and to the period's media panic about joyriding, a subject the British press covered relentlessly through the nineties. Combining a topic no commercial publisher would touch with a parody of Codemasters is exactly the humour the competition runs on.

You cannot expect a game in the usual sense. CSSCGC entries tend to be short, deliberately broken, and the joke lasts a minute or two.

It is worth loading as a curiosity and as proof that the Spectrum community in 1997 — a decade past the platform's peak — still existed and was still making things. CSSCGC runs to this day and is among the longest-lived game competitions anywhere.

How the competition turned into an archive is worth noting. Every year of CSSCGC is documented, the entries can be downloaded and the organisers' judgements survive — which has accidentally produced one of the most complete records of the amateur Spectrum scene after 1996. For historians of the platform it now serves better than many an official catalogue, because it captures who was still programming in a given year and what they cared about.