TapRacer on Steam

Two keys, strictly alternating, as fast as you can. TapRacer is a drag racer with real vehicle physics: torque curves, clutch slip, tire temperature, weight transfer. Burnout, launch, four shifts — and the quarter mile is over. Bet you never asked yourself: why this game? Well, I'm telling you anyway. Back in the day I loved games like Summer Games from 1984, where you had to waggle your joystick left and right as fast as humanly possible to be first across the line. The joysticks didn't last long. The fun lasted a whole lot longer. Problem was: animating running bodies with zero 3D experience? They'd barely look better than they did in 1984. But spinning a couple of tires, how hard can that be? During development, all those made-up numbers, factors and values bugged me more and more. In early versions, the force came from a flat 9,000 newtons, and horsepower was a multiplier called "Power" with a value of 1.0. Air resistance came at a flat rate of 0.40, and rolling resistance was 200 newtons whether the car weighed one metric ton or three. A perfect launch gifted the car 6 m/s, just like that. Nail a shift and you got 25% more force for 0.6 seconds, as if the engine enjoyed a bit of praise. Cold tires had 80% grip, got better in a dead-straight line up to 70 °C, and at 130 °C were exactly as bad as cold ones again. And later on, tuning parts weren't parts at all, just factors: "×1.45" sat in the code where today there's a real part with real torque. I couldn't stand it. My passion for cars, and my perfectionism about things that matter to me, are simply too big for that.