User-Generated Content in Stunts

[freshfeeling]

I played a lot of Stunts.exe. I didn't know this, but apparently the game changed ownership at some point and became known as 4D Sports Driving. These early polygonal cars and racetracks were special to me.

I first saw this game at my friend Andrew’s house in 1990 or 1991, and later copied the game via floppy disk, because that’s how things worked at the time. Like so many games I’ve written about in this category, I spent ages and ages building tracks and only a little bit of time racing.

 

Beyond discussing the actual content and its significance, let’s discuss a few random features:

• This is ostensibly an attempt to make a realistic driving game. When you crash, the game ends. A car is considered crashed fairly easily, by going in water, or falling a relatively short distance.
   
• Despite the realism, there are literal loop-de-loops in this game.
  
• There are also drawbridges and it’s possible to jump between them, even across a fairly sizeable gap… but only for the higher-end cars. Thus it’s normal that you can build a track that is possible in one car and impossible in others.
  
• Probably the worst car is the Audi Quattro Sport and I thought from a young age that all Audis must be comically bad cars. I think I only learned otherwise in the last decade or so. I wonder if Audi is aware of the way this game tarnished their brand.
  
• If there are built-in tracks I am not sure I ever played ‘em! (There are.)

As much as I wanted this game to be my canvas, it wouldn’t let me do exactly what I wanted. The track needs to be more-or-less contiguous, seemingly with an exception for one-block jumps. Consequently, I couldn’t just spell out words with the roads or whatever.
 

 

All of the road pieces, terrain elements and decorative features pretty much exist in one-square blocks that can be inserted on a somewhat limited, 32x32 square grid. All of the tracks I made in my youth used up a big chunk of the grid.

 

My favourite track elements were the big, flashy ones with an aspect of risk to them: jumps, corkscrews and loops. All of these required high speed to navigate which meant they’d need to be placed after at least somewhat of a straightaway. Since I was always controlling the high-performance cars with the arrow keys on my keyboard, there was a significant lack of precision, and with the long tracks and all of the interesting trick elements I wanted it would frequently take me ages to “clear check” my own racetracks. I might then have to dumb them down a bit, which is not dissimilar to when I make hard Super Mario Maker levels. Another thing I would often do is make split paths in the racetracks where one path is clearly harder than the other.

In terms of the simpler track elements one could use, I appreciated the difference between asphalt road, dirt road and icy road. You could use any of these surface types for any regular road tile.
 

There were enough types of tracks and turns that I would sometimes try to make something recognizable, like my own street!

 

The track editor in Stunts was incredibly fun to play with and I sunk a ton of time into it. I recall distinctly using an early version of DOSBox later to play it on a Pentium 3 I owned in the late 90s, and I don’t think it had lost its charm.

 

I am not a fan of many racing games, but because I was playing a fairly good, fairly fast, polygonal racing game in ‘92 or so, I remember finding Nintendo’s Stunt Race FX to be a strange phenomenon. I have never actually played Stunt Race FX to date so it’s possible I have no idea what I’m missing but I remember thinking: “this high-profile game isn’t better than this other thing I played 3 years ago that I got for free”. And that’s without consideration for the fact that Stunt Race FX didn’t have a marvelous track editor.

 
 

I call it marvelous, but let me be clear: there is better. There may have even been better racing game track editors at the time! But it was easy to use, fun to test, and the limitations may honestly have been a part of the fun.

Only after writing the bulk of this post did I check whether a sharing community still exists for this game... and boy, is there ever. ZakStunts seems to be going strong with tracks, mods, and community-based contests which are documented using the game's transferable replay files.

It's easy to get this game nowadays too, running it using DOSBox, since the game was originally shareware and now often considered abandonware (if you subscribe to that kind of thinking). It could be worth a play, really, for anyone who loves generating game content and participating in communities dedicated to that kind of thing.

For me though, it's purely about the nostalgia. It might also be great for fans of Nicholas Hoult.


You know what would be pretty spectacular for this game? Some kind of source port or mod that allows a more modern control scheme.