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This
rubber-burnin' coin-op conversion, sequel to Atari's classic Hard
Drivin', was expected around Christmas 1991.
After
the miserable attempt to get its predecessor onto the Commodore
64 (the filled polygons moved slower than London traffic), the
programmers dispensed with the own-eye 3D perspective favoured
by the coin-op, and gave the game the same perspective as the
crash replays in Hard Drivin'.
It
didn't really work. The nail-biting immediacy was lost and the
main sprite's animation defied the laws of physics. Domark wisely
decided not to release it.
The
coder of this game was actually Zach Townsend
of Ocean / Batman The Movie fame, and from a interview with him,
he informed that Race Drivin' was almost at a completed stage.
Zach
has recently reveilled to GTW that the game was subject to problems
from Domark and messing Zach and his team around. Because there
were so many delays with the signing of the contract, many of
his team were forced to go onto other projects as money was running
out.
Zach
started the project himself alone and continued it roughly for
several months before the game was cancelled by Zach. Payment
was not coming, and Zach was losing trust in Domark.
It
is known that a working demo was actually created, and according
to Zach, this is believed to be on disk somewhere as source code.
Asking whether Zach would be willing to allow GTW to release the
remains of Race Drivin', Zach has said that he will allow it once
he has managed to check his disks to ensure it still exists. Then
finally Zach may get the credit he deserves for his hard work.
Also,
it is confirmed that the screenshot here is of the actual game,
and not a replay sequence from Hard Drivin' (Which does not feature
a replay sequence in the C64 version).
Zzap
issue #75 gave a small write up about the up and coming game,
which gives plenty of details about how the game would have been
and a much clearer picture for us...
"RACE
DRIVIN' "Domark have sensibly jettisoned the solid 3-D which
doomed Hard Drivin. Instead Domark and Zach have come up with
a Paperboy style perspective, with the action shown from above,
the road scrolling at 45 degrees. There will be all the coin-op's
tracks including the standard Hard Drivin' one, Speed Circuit
and the Stunt track, complete with a corkscrew loop! There's also
a choice of four cars to drive and the Phantom Photon, a competitor
car which duplicates your last best performance so you can race
against yourself!"
Seems
like some excellent ideas there to try and save a potentially
doomed conversion... maybe this idea did not work out the way
they intended.
Zach
was very honest in saying that the game was doomed from the start.
Hard Drivin' was more Grannies Racing than anything, and Race
Drivin' should have never been started. Zach took what was a doomed
game and gave it a new perspective to save things, but it would
never be how it was originally intended. But you never know, the
new version may be good?
Time
will tell...
A
possible future title for a future update...
Frank
(Additional
source credits - Ian Osborne, Area 64, Zach Townsend)
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