Stocker

Stocker is a 1988 PC racing game and a conversion of an older Bally Sente arcade machine. You sit behind the wheel of a stock car and have to cross the United States from Florida to California — the whole race runs along the southern route across the continent, over freeways and bridges, down side roads and country lanes.

The view is top-down and the key mechanic is not a rival driver but fuel. Your tank lasts ninety seconds regardless of how fast you go, so the only opponent that genuinely matters is the clock. Refuelling happens only by passing the right points, which turns the whole game into a hunt for efficiency. The roads also branch: at junctions and forks you choose your line, and some routes are faster than others. A bad choice means a longer stretch and an empty tank in the middle of nowhere.

The controls are simple and the game is quick, but the difficulty rests almost entirely on route knowledge. Your first run ends after a few dozen seconds, your fifth gets you halfway, and that is exactly the kind of memorisation arcades loved, because it kept the coins coming.

Today Stocker is a pleasant small thing and no more. The graphics are spare, the driving feel is flat, and with no rivals on the road it lacks the tension that comparable late-eighties racers had. What remains is a pure time trial with decisions at junctions — good for half an hour rather than an evening.

On oldgame.cz Stocker starts directly in your browser, with nothing to download.