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Racing games are a video game genre in which the player participates in a racing competition. They may be based on anything from real-world racing leagues to fantastical settings. They are distributed along a spectrum between more realistic racing simulations and more fantastical arcade-style racing games.
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- We count down the greatest racing games ever, from DUB Edition to Pole Position.
- The Greatest Racing Games Ever
- 25. Rock n’ Roll Racing (1993)
- 24. Wreckfest (2018)
- 23. Wave Race 64 (1996)
- 22. Hard Drivin’ (1989)
- 21. Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition (2006)
- 20. Colin McRae Rally (1998)
- 19. Trials HD (2009)
- 18. F1 2020 (2020)
By Luke Reilly, Cam Shea
Updated: Jul 31, 2020 1:35 am
Posted: Jul 28, 2020 5:00 pm
The history of racing games dates back decades, all the way to the earliest origins of video games. Always quick to squeeze every ounce of performance from any given platform, racing games are regularly at the tip of the spear when it comes to technological leaps.
More on the best racing games:
•Best PlayStation 4 Racing Games
•Most Influential Racing Games of All Time
•A Visual History of Racing Games
The following 25 games represent a broad spectrum of racing sub-genres and are plucked from several decades of video game history, so the final mix is a fusion of influential greats, seismic smash hits, and series-best instalments. We’ve curated it with a maximum of one game per franchise in mind to ease up on repetition, so keep that in mind if some popular series below seem limited to a single heavy-hitter.
It doesn’t matter whether you win by an inch or a mile; these are the greatest racing games ever.
A memorable isometric battle racer, Rock n’ Roll Racing owes a good deal to some key trailblazers before it, including Rare’s highly-successful 1988 NES smash-hit R.C. Pro-Am and EA’s earlier Commodore 64 game Racing Destruction Set from 1985. In fact, Rock n’ Roll Racing developer Silicon & Synapse was actually behind the 1991 SNES remake of Racing Destruction Set, dubbed RPM Racing (or Radical Psycho Machine Racing, according to the box art, proving that some hastily-scrawled napkin notes really need to be left at the bar after closing time).
After Super Mario Kart launched in 1992 and sucked all the jam out of RPM Racing’s doughnut, Silicon & Synapse repurposed its remains into Rock n’ Roll Racing. The result was a racer high on ’90s attitude yet powered by your old man’s record collection, as your TV bleeped and blooped through Born to be Wild, Bad to the Bone, and Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, amongst others.
Who’s the demigod of destruction racers? The PlayStation classic Destruction Derby, perhaps? The oft-forgotten and criminally-underrated Driven to Destruction (also known as Test Drive: Eve of Destruction)? Or maybe it’s the fan-fave FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage?
Well, Wreckfest is the culmination of all of those: a magical mix of jalopy jumping, rubber ripping, metal-rending mayhem. With Wreckfest, car smashing specialists Bugbear recaptured the door-slamming spirit of its original FlatOut games and brought it back to life inside the best demolition derby game in over a decade.
The presentation is a little staid but the elbows-out competition on track is anything but, and the handling is tuned to a T. Hulking American muscle cars and land yachts squat back on their worn springs and need to be wrestled into heroic Hollywood powerslides and steered on the throttle. Smaller European and Japanese models are nimbler but they’re also lighter and require a little more finesse to manhandle around the track. And then there’s the special vehicles: school buses, RVs, lawn mowers, and even a motorised couch.
Better still, just about every panel and part on them can be punished, pulverised, or simply prised off completely.
What’s a list of radical racing games if you don’t get a little wet?
Spearheaded by some of Nintendo’s most distinguished developers, including Shinya Takahashi, Katsuya Eguchi, and Shigeru Miyamoto, Wave Race 64 was the first racing game for the Nintendo 64. It was a little short but it made a big splash on account of its thoroughly convincingly water physics – the likes of which were more or less unparalleled at the time.
The dynamic nature of race courses affected by sloshing swell made for a highly-engaging racing experience, in which you were constantly reading the waves and using the game's impressive physics to ride or launch off them. It was completely different from the static circuits gamers were used to.
Nintendo made a single follow-up – Wave Race: Blue Storm for GameCube in 2001 – but the series has been basically submerged for almost two decades now.
The series has been basically submerged for almost two decades now
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The stunt racer has a long history and there are plenty of prized examples dating all the way back to the ’80s.
Looking back at some of stunt racing’s heavyweight champions, there’s a trio of truly trendsetting stunt racers that are actually quite hard to split. In the red corner there’s Atari’s incredible Hard Drivin' arcade cabinet, which featured a clutch and a manual shifter like no other game at the time (though the home release ports tended to have frame rates you could count on one hand and the Commodore 64 version was particularly horrific). In the blue corner? Geoff Crammond’s highly-acclaimed and physics-heavy Stunt Car Racer for Amiga and a variety of other platforms (released as Stunt Track Racer in the US).
The third? Well, waiting in the parking lot to sucker punch the winner and scurry away is Distinctive Software’s derivative but very popular Stunts from 1990, which in most ways is admittedly an unashamed (albeit superior) rip-off of Hard Drivin’ with one key bonus: its amazing track editor.
[Hard Drivin's] wild loops and cutting-edge polygonal graphics were like nothing gamers had seen before
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Plenty of stunt racers have followed over the years – from Gremlin’s Fatal Racing (dubbed Whiplash in the US) to Reflection’s super-tricky Stuntman, and the long-running Trackmania series – but we’ll give the belt to Hard Drivin’ here, because its wild loops and cutting-edge polygonal graphics were like nothing gamers had seen before.
California’s Angel Studios (which became Rockstar San Diego in 2002) deserves a stack of credit for being a pioneer of open world racing; after all, the studio created the Midtown Madness, Smuggler's Run, and Midnight Club series.
Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition was the first time the series would feature licensed cars, however, and its array of vehicles was almost as diverse as its killer soundtrack. More than that, though, its gameplay was rough, rugged, and thrilling; DUB Edition had a superb sense of speed as you gunned towards the next smoke-signal checkpoint, flinging your car sideways around corners as you fanged through the dense traffic of the game’s three sprawling cities.
1994’s SEGA Rally Championship is an unconditional legend of off-road arcade racing. With its fantastic force feedback and pioneering simulation of mixed surfaces, sitting in a SEGA Rally cabinet was like little else for enthusiastic arcade visitors.
SEGA Rally Championship would make its way to Saturn and PC in the following years, but it would be an earnest imitator from Codemasters in 1998 that would subsequently grab the rally gauntlet – and it hasn’t let go since.
The Colin McRae Rally series has never been the only rally racer on the block but it has become the definition of rally games
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The Colin McRae Rally series has never been the only rally racer on the block but it has become the definition of rally games, from its genre-leading beginnings to its reinvention as the Dirt franchise.
With input from McRae himself, plus route notes from McRae’s experienced co-driver Nicky Grist, punishingly tricky stages, and service areas for limited car repairs, the original Colin McRae Rally was stern and serious in a way SEGA Rally was not. It was really the first modern rally sim.
Part racing game, part puzzle platformer, Trials HD is a bitter competition against the clock (and your closest friends).
Following in the tyre tracks of early motorcycle trial games like Kikstart II, Trials HD is set on a series of increasingly dangerous, side-scrolling, makeshift motorcycle trial courses that got tougher and tougher.
Heavy on physics and light on forgiveness, Trials HD was actually developer RedLynx’s third game in the series (it had begun life almost a decade earlier) but its much-publicised arrival on Xbox Live Arcade saw Trials HD turn into a bit of a phenomenon.
With a small needle on-screen representing your friends’ times relative to your current run, it was certainly possible to lose countless evenings chasing your invisible friends as they hovered just hundredths of a second in front of you. Seriously, watching that needle nudge just in front of your bike at the last moment was an emotionally sapping experience. The only way you could be more haunted by a friend’s ghost would be if they actually died and came back to rearrange your furniture while you were out.
Open wheel racing is really the pinnacle of motorsport, and Formula 1 games in particular have flourished throughout multiple generations, advancing dramatically alongside hardware improvements.
Formula 1 games in particular have flourished throughout multiple generations
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To take nothing away from UK Formula Three game Revs (released on the BBC Micro in 1984 and on Commodore 64 the following year and generally regarded as the first true racing simulator) and Papyrus’ legendary IndyCar games, it’s Formula 1 that has seen the lion’s share of top-notch virtual open wheel racing over the decades. There’s Microprose’s fabled Formula One Grand Prix and Grand Prix 2 (from celebrated racing game design guru Geoff Crammond), and Papyrus’ punishing portrayal of the 1967 Grand Prix season in the exalted Grand Prix Legends. There are also the much-loved Murray Walker-packed Psygnosis/Bizarre Creations games of the late ’90s, as well as EA’s somewhat forgotten but fantastic F1 Challenge ’99-’02 (don't be turned off by the EA Sports branding; these games were developed by Image Space Incorporated, the studio that would go on to create rFactor using these F1 games as the bedrock).
What are racing games? Racing games are a type of video game that involves the player controlling a vehicle either from a first-person or third-person perspective. While many types of racing games are available, they all share a common goal of crossing the finish line before anyone else.
Sep 30, 2024 · The best racing games on PC feature everything from classics like Need for Speed and Burnout Paradise to more modern games like Forza Horizon 5 and The Crew Motorfest.
Apr 7, 2020 · Racing games have evolved throughout the decades. In 1973, the very first racing game was born: the Atari’s Space Race, where two players took control of spaceships in an attempt to be the first to cross the screen. The same year, the developer Taito released a similar game called Astro Race.
