Car Builder (Crashes)

When someone said "simulator" in the early eighties, they meant something peculiar. Car Builder, also known as Crashes, is the strangest testament to what you could imagine on an original PC: build a car and then deliberately smash it to pieces. That's it.

The game is so rare that specific details are hard to track down — mostly you just find mentions that it exists. It falls into the murky category of educational and experimental games that the IBM PC was churning out in its early days. Either you're assembling a vehicle from individual parts, or you're really just playing around with what happens when you send it at high speed into an obstacle. Simple graphics, simple ideas.

The controls are intuitive mainly because there isn't much to control. You click, select components, a counter runs somewhere. Playing doesn't require skill, more curiosity — what car will I build and what will happen? The actual gameplay itself doesn't have much staying power. After a while you know how it works, and then it's just repetition.

Car Builder is more of a craft piece than a game that'll lock you in for an afternoon. Among the eighties attempts at simulation and interactive experiments, it's one that at least had an idea — maybe to get kids thinking about how cars work. Nowadays you'd call that "edutainment," but in 1982 it was just weird software that someone dared to release.

When you find it in online archives now and fire it up in the browser, it's more about capturing the atmosphere of the era than actual fun. Retro is appealing when there's some worthwhile content to it — here it's more of a curiosity. But it's precisely these curiosities that make computer history interesting: uncompromising, strange, indifferent to whether they'd sell a million copies.