Stunt Driver

1990 was a busy year for racing games on PC. Stunts by Broderbund was rewriting the genre and we spent hours with it. Then there was Stunt Driver by Sphere, Inc. — a game that arrived at the same time, aimed at similar territory, and today only a few remember it.

Stunt Driver is a racing game with an emphasis on stunt driving, set in an environment full of ramps, obstacles, and road courses designed to make flying through the air more fun than crossing the finish line first. It's not a simulation, it's a show — at least that was the intention.

The controls are straightforward, the physics acceptable for the time, and the graphics in the period wireframe 3D style looked solid back then. The game offered various types of challenges and environments where you could jump, drift, and crash into things with a sense that this was how it should be. The problem is, that feeling was never quite convincing. The cars behave a bit sluggishly, feedback is missing, and the career lacks the magnetism that forces you to say "one more lap".

And here's the heart of the matter: Stunt Driver aged like the Stunts neighbor who won the lottery and didn't. Both games share a foundation — stunt tracks, freedom of movement, a bit of madness. But Stunts had a track editor, better-developed physics, and that inexplicable spark that turns a technical game into fun. Stunt Driver plays it safe, afraid to let loose. It's not a bad game, just average at a time when average wasn't enough.

Today it's worth trying mainly out of curiosity — as a footnote in the genre's history. If you played Stunts back then and want to see how it could have turned out without the right chemistry, Stunt Driver is the answer. For everyone else, it's more of a museum piece than an evening's entertainment. Fire it up in DOSBox through your browser and you'll have the full picture in a quarter hour.