Car Racer  (Preview V2)
Platform: Commodore 64
Region: PAL
Gametype: Undefined
Release Year: 199x
Developer: SAMAR
Programmer: Stinger, Samar
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Car Racer
199? SAMAR

Status: Preview, Findability: 5/5
Coding: Stinger/Samar
Graphics: Levi & Stinger/Samar
Sound: N/a

A very smooth and nice little racing game at a very early stage.

The game features a Lotus looking red car, that drives along a very smooth rasterbar road. The actual road itself is very detailed, with well animated white lines and pitstop lanes.

The sound is quite basic, with some simple engine sounds and that is it. The game comes with no titles, and the game area features no real details, apart from a half screen display for the driving.

After some waiting, a lead at last for this intriguing racing game.

At first we thought it was Lotus 2 early preview, but it seems that Samar were infact been behind this car racer.

Recently a later version of the game had been released, with a texture mapped road which looks quite impressive for the C64. It’s a little slow, but what do you expect. It seems to have taken a few strides since its original form which has been on GTW for a while now. There are even some 3d wireframes there which look as if they would have featured on the tracks. This version is claimed to be at 20% completion. And it is likely said that Samar will never finish it.

Rafal of Samar got in contact with GTW, and has conducted a special "Creator Speaks" with one of the guys behind the game. It seems the game was done because Stinger simply wanted to see a better car racing game on the C64. It certainly looked like it was on the right tracks, featuring road effects similiar to Lotus 2 on the Amiga.

Rafal also uncovered another rare preview of this game, which actually includes a split screen version of the game with two cars. At the moment they are not separate, but apparently there was a preview that DID have separate controllable cars… but it was sadly lost.

It seems that the game had a lot of ambition, but was a little bit too much to expect from the little humble C64. Who knows. But its a promising preview, sadly that didn’t get very far.

A neat and detailed little racer…

Contributions: Rafal Szyja, Mariusz Rozwadowski, Bartek

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Ramos (Mariusz Rozwadowski) speaks about work on Collapsar...

Hi Ramos , do you have any info on that "Car racer" they recently added to GTW?

R: I have further development stage.

Why was the game not finished?

R: Because Stinger (Krzysztof Szczech) wanted to finish demos on c64  Game started about 1995 , Gfx was also made by Stringer but car models were created by Levi (Tomasz Lewandowski)

Was the game meant to be commercial?

R: At the beginning it wasn't planned but in case the game was finished it was propable, Stringer started programming it because he wanted just to do better racing game on c64 but he never went back to the project.

What else was planned for the game?

R: menu of course ;-) and more tracks.

What shocked me is textured road in that preview Axelerate revealed  recently.

R: Looking at Stinger's skills this game would be fantastic. It's possible that I gain source code from him or try to talk about getting down and finishing that game.

http://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/car-racer/
