Talismanic of that attitude is the now legendary poem button in the controls list.

Go shoot these cars.’ Instead, Interstate ‘76 strived for something with more character. Keep in mind that this is a driving-shooty game from 1997 it would have been ample exposition to tell the player, ‘You’re a vigilante.

Mentor Taurus, who partnered Groove’s sister before she died, is there to make sure he fulfils that obligation. He’s horrified to learn she was caught up in that world, but at the same time feels an irresistible sense of duty to follow the same path. He finds himself behind the wheel of a modded, weaponised Picard Piranha after his vigilante sister ticks off the wrong crime lord and winds up catching a fatal (or is it, etc.) bullet. Player-character Groove Champion is mixed up in all this highway warfare by sheer chance. Interstate ‘76 is preposterous, then, but because its visual design, soundtrack and core mechanics reinforce its ideas so well, it’s the kind of preposterous you can get behind. Settings and plot arcs in vehicular combat games are preposterous by necessity, of course, because they have to accommodate a) the existence of wholly impractical machines and b) people solving their every problem by driving those machines. It is the game release of 1997 that should be preserved forevermore. Instead, it’s something strange and distinct in between the two.

It’s a game that achieves remarkable harmony between its visual style, narrative and what you do as the player, and it does so in a world that’s not quite seventies pastiche or fantasy dystopia. Set in an alt-history southwestern USA in which the 1973 oil crisis provoked the rise of criminal gangs and a resultant vigilante uprising, Interstate ‘76 is a vehicular combat game as concerned with nailing an aesthetic as it is with the mechanics of cars shooting at one another. There are probably a total of seventy polygons onscreen, and yet the game’s stylistic vision and world of bizarre menace are communicated instantly. There’s a moment just seconds into Interstate ‘76’s intro cinematic that I think neatly captures its spirit: two American hot rods are racing along a desert highway, one firing its roof-mounted machine guns perfectly in sync with the wacka-wacka funk guitar underpinning the scene, while the other weaves from side to side in front of it, also in time with the music. We’re going to select the games that still have more to give. Not those you’ve played to death, or the classics that the industry has already learned from. We only have time to rescue one game from each year. Every game released before 2015 is being destroyed.

System shock intro cinematic