Tire Fire Rally - Sports Cars in Traffic

    I'm going to be transparent, I didn't really start this game with any ethos in mind. The original note for the game said “A NASCAR game, but with stupid things on every lap.” But I have a lot of time alone with my thoughts while I'm actually building my stupid idea, and I’ve been going around and around trying to figure out why I wanted to make fun of racing in the first place.

    I’ve been advertising this game as a racing game being made by someone who hates driving, which is mostly true. I hate traffic, car maintenance, insurance, parking, pretending to care about dents and scratches, and of course, car payments. The day to day of owning and using a car is expensive and dull and I despise it, except for one month in 2020.

    That summer, my city was brought to a standstill between COVID, protests, and the presence of the National Guard. I had a job that kept me out a few hours past the curfew and left me driving through a completely deserted city covered in boards and bright protest graffiti with fucking armored Humvees sitting on the overpass. I fucking loved it. I would blast the soundtrack to JSFR and speed through my city at what would have been very dangerous speeds if anyone ever had been out. It is the only time in my life that driving actually felt like the “freedom” all the car companies try to sell it as, and I think that taste of how fun they could actually be made me paradoxically hate cars all the more.

    It really highlighted how we were building these machines with capabilities that had almost nothing to do with how they would be used. Super cars are engineered to handle above 120 mph and bluff emissions detectors only to idle in L.A. traffic for most of their lives. Trucks that can haul multiple tones of steel will move a couch once or twice if they're lucky. SUVs are built like they should be crouched on an overpass enforcing a curfew instead of shuttling kids back and forth. Using my car in the post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk city, it felt like it was a toy instead of an expensive and poor excuse for proper public transit, and I hate that I am paying to keep all these systems that we're designed for speed and agility that I will almost never reach in working order.

    I've also been playing a decent amount of racing games in my little bit of spare time. You know, for “research.” A lot of them treat cars like they're somewhere between religious icons and pornographic. They make them almost deities, which makes me want to act as an iconoclast. I wanted to take these machines that were built for non-existent stretches of open, perfectly maintained highways and race tracks and subject them to the drudgery of traffic, potholes, and toll booths. I think it’s the same instinct that made people tune into The Simple Life to see the disgustingly wealthy working a fast food job.

    That being said, a lot of the original ideas I wanted to throw into the game turned out to be very boring. It’s funny to see a Corvette in traffic, but not fun to be a Corvette in traffic. This is still a game after all. So, a lot of the obstacles got ratcheted up in weirdness. The current mood is a bit like taking fashion models and forcing them to run through a Wipeout course. I think that's close enough to my original notes. I wanted to make fun of the culture of racing and over engineering because it had virtually nothing to do with normal driving, started with frustrating realism, and ended up with something goofy and light hearted.

    If Wipeout with cars sounds cool to you, wish list the game on Steam before the demo comes out.