This 2000s Racing Game Let You Thrash a Mercury Sable and Ford Ranger Like an Idiot

One of my favorite things to do in any racing game, be it Gran Turismo or Forza or whatever, is take an old, large, and not particularly fast car and whip it around the track with no modifications. Feeling all that weight transfer and instability is stupid fun. The problem is that few games, even those mentioned, have truly boring stuff—cars with zero performance appeal whatsoever. Like, for example, a Mercury Sable Wagon. One did though, and it deserves more respect than it’s gotten over the years.

Vanishing Point, developed by the short-lived U.K. studio Clockwork Games and published by the equally defunct Acclaim, released for the PlayStation and Dreamcast at the very start of 2001. By this point, the writing was already on the wall for Sega’s last home console, so you could practically guarantee that version of the game would never be noticed by anyone.

This was an arcade racer but with a pseudo-realistic slant, insofar as its physics model was quite sophisticated for its time, especially in terms of suspension behavior. To showcase this, the developers included a slate of absolute pigs to drive around before you work your way up to the faster stuff, like the Dodge Viper and TVR Cerbera you’d expect from a late-’90s/early aughts racing game.

Amusingly, almost all of the boring cars were Ford products: You had the Ranger, Explorer, Taurus (weirdly the second-gen—not the more recent “Ovoid” version, which was already well established by 2001), aforementioned Mercury Sable Wagon and, I’m not kidding, a Windstar minivan. There was also a ’64 Thunderbird, SVT-style Ford Focus, and pre-New Edge SN95 Mustang, but I’m particularly interested in the cars you won’t find in other racers.

Weird as it is to see them in Vanishing Point, it kind of makes sense when you consider the structure of the game. It’s not so much about direct, wheel-to-wheel competition and jockeying for position as it is about setting the fastest time, while tons of competitors are trying to do the same. That means there are always cars ahead of you, and always have someone to pass who is usually going slower. There’s also a Stunt Driver mode—sort of like Crazy Taxi’s Crazy Box—with obstacle course-type challenges, and that’s where the physics really come alive. They’re full of jumps and corkscrew-like ramps designed to roll your vehicle in mid-air. Imagine an evasive driving course in a skate park designed for cars, and you get the idea.

These challenges are difficult yet rewarding to nail because of Vanishing Point’s somewhat exaggerated, floaty driving model. It wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea—I didn’t appreciate it until probably 15 years after it came out—but it was a neat spin on a conventional racing game, which was hard to achieve on platforms with loads of them.

An old developer interview in the U.K.’s Official Dreamcast Magazine (starts on page 72) explains how Clockwork sought to merge Sega Rally’s smooth handling with the dramatic, amusement park-like locales of Scud Race, another beloved Sega arcade racing game. It also mentions that the title was architected for PS1 but used the Dreamcast’s increased horsepower for a resolution bump and 60 frames-per-second gameplay. The latter is definitely the version to play, as this oddity never landed on the PS2 or newer platforms. And that’s a shame, because Vanishing Point was kind of like the video game equivalent of neutral-dropping a Dodge Aries—an ideal I think we can all agree more driving games should strive for.

Got a tip? Email us at tips@thedrive.com

The post This 2000s Racing Game Let You Thrash a Mercury Sable and Ford Ranger Like an Idiot appeared first on The Drive.