Top 20 Racing Games EVER 

Racing games have been around seemingly forever. Mankind’s obsession with speed, competition and pushing the limits of technology all come together aggressively into motorsports, and for the most part these involve driving fast cars round a race track trying your very best to shave a few milliseconds off your previous lap time. Considered to be manly sporting affairs, it’s no surprise that there’s a lot of competition involved as the men take it in turns to prove themselves as the champions of whatever game it is that they may be playing. Perhaps this is what attracted men to computer games in the first place, whilst on-looking women shrug their shoulders and roll their eyes at proceedings…

It was Atari’s Gran Trak 10 that started this whole love affair with the racing game that over the years has snowballed into a massive genre across every conceivable platform. Namco’s Pole Position (pictured above) then popularised the genre and set the world’s hearts a-pounding. Through the years, there have been numerous stand-out titles – Geoff Crammond, famous for his Grand Prix series, would produce the world’s first racing “simulator”, REVS, for the BBC Microcomputer, then there were the very popular titles of Outrun, Final Lap, and Hard Drivin’ (pictured below) in the late 80s that all pushed the genre along at a phenomenal speed. The 90s then saw the introduction of the aforementioned Formula One Grand Prix, and the Mario Kart and Ridge Racer series both entered into the fray too, and it wasn’t long until Sony gave us the almighty world conquering Gran Turismo, which I must admit I’m a massive fan. 

This list isn’t about my opinions though, it’s actually been compiled by the readers of Retro Gamer magazine (unbeknown to them) through the discussions on the forums of the Retro Gamer website. I won’t bore you with the statistical information on how all these games got to the positions that they achieve, but basically it involved tallying up unique mentions of each title and simply adding them all together in one impressive looking database (if I do say so myself!). So, as much as I’d like to take credit for inventing this list, I’m afraid it has been compiled mathematically and logically, so my opinions are out of the window on the final positions.

I would still like to hear the opinions of those who read through this Top 20 though, so please leave some comments on this feature and how you undoubtedly will think that it’s all entirely wrong. Naturally there will be some bias on older games as that’s what my pool are most interested in, but I think everyone will find something to love in this list.

Altogether there were over 180 individual games shortlisted for this countdown, but 20 of them were mentioned nearly 4 times as frequently as the rest, so turn the page for part 1 of the Top 20 racing games EVER…