Chicago 90

The most primitive racing game you can run on DOS. Chicago 90 is an amateur attempt with a car made of four pixels, trying to simulate driving through the streets of some American metropolis. Which is funny, because all you see on screen are road stripes and a car from above, as if you're looking at a garage roof.

It's a racing game from 1989, when its creators thought it was enough to have a car that moves left and right, plus a few obstacles in the form of other vehicles. The goal is simple: drive through the course without crashing. The controls work at a basic level — left and right arrows steer the car, and that's basically all you need. There are no turbos, no drifts, no banking. It's so straightforward you feel like a driver training on paper.

The graphics are downright brutal. Colors sticking to an eight-tone palette, the car looks like a shuffled square, the terrain is monotonous turquoise. The sound — if you can even call that scratchy buzz sound — is no reason to rejoice. Yet there's something oddly hypnotic about it. A half-minute track goes by quickly, there are moments when you narrowly dodge another car on the road, and then it just ends.

Chicago 90 belongs in the category of games that were made because the creators knew about Pole Position or Spy Hunter, but didn't have the money or time for original ideas. It was probably bundled with a hundred other similar games and forgotten by everyone within three months. It aged poorly — no action, no content, no reason to play it twice.

If you want to see today what kind of weak games could be sold in the late eighties, Chicago 90 is a good example. You'll find it in a browser among hundreds of other forgotten attempts. You'll play it for five minutes, and it takes an unbelievable twenty seconds of that time for boredom to set in. Who knows, maybe it's precisely because nobody mastered it that it somehow became a piece of eighties industrial kitsch.