Before Microsoft became a major gaming player with its Xbox consoles, the mega-multinational would occasionally release a PC game to give computer users something to do when they weren’t staring at spreadsheets in Excel.
Every now and then we even got a racing game, among the more important pleasures like flight simulators, golf games and… Minesweeper. Midtown Madness did something that few other racing games did at the time: linear circuits through an open city, in this case Chicago, with a number of checkpoints, during rush hour. Great for that time.
It will now be clear where the ‘midtown’ in the title comes from; the ‘madness’ was provided by the fact that, in certain game situations, you could check off the checkpoints in any order. That meant cars careening past each other in every conceivable direction, leading to bum-squeezing near misses and, of course, collisions of colossal proportions here and there.
That’s how you could win Midtown Madness
The path to success involved finding the most efficient route between the intermediate stations, a unique challenge that required a solid understanding of downtown Chicago and some serious recalibration of your racing instincts. If you’re the type who manages to miss a turn even with the navi on, you don’t stand a chance here.
You would be justified in saying that the madness also applied to the car list, which was less a shiny collection of desirable cars and more like the offerings of a cheap rental company. If you’ve ever fantasized about driving a car through the streets of the Windy City, it probably wasn’t a Cadillac Eldorado.
The only concession made to sheer horsepower was the inclusion of the Panoz GTR-1 racer, which was normally more likely to be seen blaring around Le Mans than overtaking taxis at busy intersections.
The precursor of Red Dead Redemption?
Still: developer Angel Studios quickly made up for the lack of horsepower when it changed into Rockstar San Diego and then the iconic cowboy game Red Dead Redemption that was really full of horses…
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