Hard Drivin’ (Commodore 64)

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Hard Drivin’ was in many ways a very impressive game for its time. It could also be a lot of fun under the right circumstances. However, as much as I love the Commodore 64, playing this game on that system was definitely not the right circumstances.

Hard Drivin’ is a 3D racing game developed by Atari and released in arcades in 1989. Similar to many such games you race around a track and must hit checkpoints by a certain time. The uniqueness of the game came from the stunt track option and the advanced (for the time anyway) polygonal 3D graphics as well as force feedback in the arcade version. The stunt track included things like a loop and jumps. Another unique aspect of the game was the ability to race yourself by racing against a ghost car from a previous run. In fact, this game led to a patent on that particular functionality.

The problem is that this game doesn’t hold up particularly well over time. Even in the original arcade version, the frame rate was not great. It was distractingly low in fact. And while the polygon graphics were interesting for the time, the limited number of courses (only the race course and the stunt course), and lack of detail meant the game became boring pretty quickly. Now take an arcade game with advanced 32-bit processors and an already low frame rate and port it to the 8-bit Commodore 64. What you get is a game that, while it doesn’t look too far off from the original graphically allowing for the relative limitations of the C64, the frame rate is absolutely abysmal. I mean, even on my top of the line circa 1993 486 DX2-66, this game felt slow. On the C64 it’s practically a turn based game which doesn’t work particularly well for racing. Or doing stunts.

There were other, better conversions of course but even these could only do so much. The real complaint at the time was that home conversions, like the one for the Sega Genesis, while faithfully reproducing the arcade version, didn’t add anything. You were still limited to the same two tracks and lack of competition (except for yourself and the clock anyway).

I love my C64 but this was NOT the game for that system. If you do want to give Hard Drivin’ a try, you are probably best off using MAME to play the original arcade version. Other than that, you could give one of the 16-bit versions a try. It was available for the Amiga, Atari ST, DOS, Atari Lynx and the Sega Genesis as well as a few other systems. Definitely skip the C64 version.

This game was quite popular at the time of its release and it spawned a few sequels including Race Drivin’ (1990) and Hard Drivin’ II – Drive Harder (1991). There were a couple other planned but unreleased sequels as well including Hard Drivin’s Airborne and Street Drivin’.

To give you and idea of what I mean when I allude to poor frame rates, I did a quick search to see if I could find what the actual frame rate was. While I didn’t find anything for Hard Drivin’, I did find a reference to Race Drivin’ on the SNES. The original release had a frame rate of approximately 4 fps. Remember that when you are whining about only getting 30 fps on the latest first person shooter.

Images above are from the Commodore 64 version.