Hot Wheels

There was plenty to play on Commodore 64, but Hot Wheels ranks among those titles that leave you scratching your head even now. A game from the brand famous for die-cast toy cars, it's an auto simulator in the lowest league — when cars and roads remain, at least something stays on the screen.

You sit behind the wheel (at least in your mind) and your task is to navigate the track as if you could buy the matching toy car from a fifty-haléř box at the newsstand. The game offers something like races on prepared courses. The goal is to reach the finish line without unnecessary contact with guardrails, trees, or opponents. Imagine the most primitive driving simulator conceivable — joystick, accelerator, brake, turning. That's all.

The mechanics are honest in their own way. The car responds with incredible lag, turning is slow as a sightseeing taxi, and the physics are self-destructive. When you brake at the last second before a turn, the vehicle gets the impression it's stationary, then suddenly lurches forward. You learn the controls through repeated crashes and more crashes. The graphics are what Commodore 64 had the capacity to process — the car looks like a colored rectangle with wheels, the landscape like a bunch of pixels. Most importantly — the game is slow. Very slow. As if the screen shifts one square every two seconds.

Hot Wheels from '84 or thereabouts surprised no one. When Commodore 64 was starting out, most games really only had one theme and one mechanic — Hot Wheels is living proof of that. This isn't a case of the game aging better than expected. It's a case of it being old the moment it was released. The sound is a few bleeps, music practically none.

Why play it today? In an emulator perhaps only for a piece of history. It's not a disaster — you can tell someone tried. But the attempt didn't pay off. Eighties gamers had better-controlled and faster games to choose from. Hot Wheels on an 8-bit computer is worth playing when you want to feel how hard it was to program racing games when every byte counted.