Stunts

About the game

Stunts (also known as 4D Sports Driving) understood that the point of a racing game is showing off. Its circuits are less roads than carnival apparatus — corkscrews, loop-the-loops, banked corners, drawbridge jumps and tunnel slaloms — driven in exotica from a Porsche 962 to a Lamborghini Countach, each with genuinely different weight, grip and appetite for disaster. Crashes are celebrated with lovingly slow replays.

The replay system and the track editor made it immortal. Every race can be reviewed, saved and shared; every track can be rebuilt, extended or booby-trapped in the editor, which shipped in the box at a time when user-generated content was a radical idea. Decades of community tracks and ghost-time tournaments followed — competitive scenes that outlived the studio itself.

Its flat-shaded polygon world looks primitive now, but the physics' willingness to let you fail spectacularly — barrel-rolling off a half-finished loop into a grandstand — captured something racing games spent the next decades re-learning: freedom is funnier than realism.

Technical notes

Flat-shaded 3D polygon engine with multiple camera replays and a full in-box track editor. The archive documents DOS, Amiga and FM Towns releases.