I have no idea how many hours I spent on this game growing up. There was just something about it that made it very engaging. Being able to easily make a brand new track and then either go racing or just fool around.

I've long since wished there was a spiritual remake, and thinking about it now I suppose Beam.NG could fit the bill if the editor was even simpler and the damage model was significantly reduced or even disabled. Been a good while since I played Beam.NG, guess I should check it out again.

But not after trying this out. Stunts FTW!

edit: my flashback made me totally forget to say I really enjoyed this writeup. I did a little bit of hacking like this back in the days, so can appreciate the effort.

Thank you! I think also the game Trackmania (which I only enjoy as stream viewer) manages to keep most of the soul, including the friendly competition to create the craziest tracks and acrobatics. The big thing it's missing is Stunts' spirit of the late XX century, with the Lamborghini cars, the rock soundtrack and Skid Vicious.

+1 to both of those. Same experience

Yeah, I somehow forgot about Trackmania. I think what I dislike about Trackmania is it's a bit too over the top, both in vehicle physics and the track layouts.

Granted the original Stunts didn't have much in terms of vehicle physics, but I feel for a modern remake Trackmania goes a bit too extreme.

Now if Trackmania and Beam.NG had a baby...

I loved stunts as a kid, I remember sharing tracks with a friend, and making up all kinds of stories and scenarios in those tracks. Excellent game, excellent write up. Happy to see the game still has a community.

Brøderbund was the publisher of "Stunts", but not the developer. The developer was Distinctive Software Inc. who had previously developed the hit games Test Drive and Test Drive II: The Duel for Accolade. For whatever reason, Accolade developed Test Drive III in-house, and DSI developed Stunts on their own.

After Stunts, DSI got bought by Electronic Arts. They were briefly "Pioneer Productions" (or at least, people from DSI were part of that group within EA) and made the original Need For Speed, but eventually became just a part of EA Canada.

> Brøderbund was the publisher of "Stunts", but not the developer. The developer was Distinctive Software Inc.

This is literally the first thing I write in the article :-) I also link to a video about DSI's story which in my opinion deserves more views.

Test Drive III being developed by a different company explains why that game is visionary but fundamentally broken, while DSI's creations are still fun to play.

I loved TD3 as much as I loved stunts. I never thought it was fundamentally broken, but as a 10ish year old kid, you take what you can get.

Maybe you had exactly the right CPU for it? On my old computer TD3 run ~3x faster than it should have because the devs forgot to implement the game clock calibration, an unforgivable sin for a 1990 game. On top of that the steering sensitivity was completely off.

Ross Scott made an excellent review of the game, illustrating its problems as well as its memorable design ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68zZZn8wy4E

Reading the article before commenting is too hard apparently! Fantastic article btw

Interesting! I spent a lot of time on both Test Drive II on the ST and the original Need For Speed on the 3DO — I never knew Pioneer made both.

What a legacy. Launched only golden geese, of which two were run over by the parent company.

In college, we went deep into this game. We realized you needed to have a closed circuit track for it to let you play, so we made a small circle track in the corner and the "real" track was off-road.

Then we could have half-completed banked curves, alternating banked curves where you had to thread the needle to not crash, etc. We used all kinds of bugs in our tracks. I remember you could drive over water if you were within 90 degrees of facing the fence, or get a bonus boost by hitting a jump at juat the right angle.

Sadly, we lost all our levels in a HD failure. But what a fun, buggy ass game. The best were the crashes where you'd "shoot the moon".

> alternating banked curves where you had to thread the needle to not crash

I must steal this design trick! Thanks for sharing your memories!

I played this game to death! I still fondly remember sending the purple lamborguinni to the moon :-) with the right combination of travck pieces.

Ahh yeah the connection point of bridges did that sometimes

I played this game long enough ago that I needed the LOD adjustment to hit 5fps. Nice write-up!

Aside: I would pay real currency for an official Brøderbund t-shirt. Probably not possible now. I always knew I would enjoy whatever game it was I was starting when I saw that ship logo and the 'funny O'.

It’s so weird how beloved and prolific this game was in certain spheres but that was just it, no sequel or anything.

Maybe the distribution was bad, never recall seeing it in a store was always pirated from kid to kid but we all had it.

I remember the thrill of hitting a wall at just the wrong angle and being transported into space by the collision "physics"... Wonderful stuff!

In a way I love how the Battlefield games continues[1] that tradition[2].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/GamePhysics/comments/qn5s3g/battlef...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eY1M3cjrEj4

The game veterans exploit these mechanisms in incredible ways. The best times for most tracks feature cars quantum-tunnelling through solid obstacles, taking off and skidding while flying in the sky, tricking the track limits mechanism in order to cut out large portions of the lap without being penalized, and more.

I’m always thrilled when someone posts something new about Stunts. I had such a good time with that game in college. :)

I loved this game so much

Great work!