Let’s just say this right away: yes, Skid marks is a deliberate reference to the well-known underwear evil that falls to sloppy sweepers. Literally the only reason we’re allowed to use that word in 20 point letters on this website is that it’s also the name of one of the best multiplayer racing games ever made.
The Skidmarks-series made its debut on the Amiga home computer (that’s what those things were called then) and continued on Super Off Road, with an isometric perspective and a Platonic ideal of drifting and sliding. The title of the game owes at least a little to the fact that every time you parked your little car against something, it left two big stripes, be it rubber or splashed mud. At the end, the track looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Why was Super Skidmarks so good back then?
There were a few things that set the game above its competitors. One was a smart one pixel art- technique that dither (literally: dawdle) and gave all elevations and edges a much more organic look than we were used to at the time. Ironic, because dawdling was also what we did when we once again accidentally went the wrong way on the figure-8 circuit and had to do an 18-way turn to get back on track.
Something else what Super Skid marks so cool: the ability to link two high-end Amiga 1200 machines together so that you could play against each other with eight. It’s one of those things that we all take for granted in these internet-driven times, where you can have a bucket of caffé latte delivered to your front door with a flick of the thumb, but in the early 1990s, gaming with so many people at once bordered on witchcraft. At least.
And if you were anything like us back then, all the little cars looked like a cow strapped to an off-road chassis. Those were good times.
Gameplay of Super Skidmarks
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