Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge. What a game! But better than that, what a series of games. I'm cheating a little bit today, because I'm not going to talk about just one game, but the whole series. Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge on the Amiga occupied a significant amount of my teenage game playing years. I never had a console when I was young - all my gaming years were on home computers, mainly ZX Spectrums and Commodore Amigas. Lotus 1 was one of those games that my friend Kevin had on a random floppy disc. I've no idea where he'd originally got it from, I think it was one of those cases where his Dad had a friend who had a friend, who knew a bloke, who somewere down the line had access to a BBS and got a hacked copy of the game. As is the nature of the late 80s and early 90s, pirate software was everywhere and somehow we all managed to get hold of a copy of the great games. Anyway, one day I was round Kev's house and going through a pile of discs that he had when he put in this one and said "This is a great racing game - and it supports multiplayer where we can race against each other!". I was in. We booted it up and I was immediately struck by the opening sequence and the music. There was something about it that really grabbed me. We played it for pretty much the whole afternoon, with Kevin beating me on pretty much every race. At the end of the day I asked if I could borrow the game so that I could practice as Kev had clearly played it a fair few times before me and I was sure he'd want a bit more of a competition the next time. Kevin didn't think I'd be able to make up the skill gap as he'd been playing it for a few weeks, but I promised that next time we played I'd be much better. I took the game home and practiced, not just with the aim of beating Kev but because the game had hooked me. I fell in love with it and how good it was. The following week I went back round to Kevin's and took the disc back. As we sat down to play I was much more confident about my skills and as we played I won race after race, eventually winning the whole in game season. I'm not sure Kevin was impressed, but by this point I had my own copy of the game (via our friend x-copy, obviously) and was diving deep into it.
Phase two of my relationship with Lotus 1 came a week or so later with my best friend Sean. Sean liked cars and racing games and so one day I broke out Lotus 1 and handed him a joystick. We played all afternoon and it immediately became apparent that Sean was much better competition than Kevin was (sorry Kev!). Our races were even balanced and we were never quite sure who was going to win each race. We played it a lot. Like, A LOT. Eventually my Mum referred to the main opening music as "Sean's Theme" and it became one of two games that we relentlessly played. The other one will also crop up here as an article at some point. The thing about Lotus 1 is that it was just so fast and smooth.
One year (I forget which year, but I'm going to guess 1990ish) my friend Steve and I went to the Computer Entertainment Show at Earls Court in London. Steve's step-dad worked for EMAP publishing and he'd got us free press pass tickets to the event. Gremlin had a massive stand there and they were running a Lotus 1 competition on a massive cinema size screen. If I remember correctly, it was sized so that the on screen cars were life size. Watching that competition run was amazing and I only ever dragged that memory up after having played the game with Kev and Sean. If things had been ordered a little bit differently, I would totally have had a go at that competition. In my head, I would have won it; easy.
Soon enough Lotus 2 became a thing and started turning up in magazines. It looked good. Single player was now full screen instead of just occupying half the screen and better yet, you could connect two Amigas with a null-modem cable and play 2 player, with both players having full screen. At this point Sean and I were Lotus fanatics and as soon as this game became available, I bought it. Yes - I actually bought it! It was well worth it. The change in structure of the game becoming point to point races instead of circuit races gave the game a different edge. Now we weren't exactly racing each other, we were racing against the stopwatch to get to the checkpoint in time to cross the line and get another valuable 45 seconds. Whenever we got close to each other, there was always a certain amount of swerving or trying to push each other into the barriers but if one of us made it across the checkpoint and the other one didn't we immediately switched to cheering on the one still playing, urging them towards the next checkpoint so that we could continue. In the early days of playing the game this was mainly to see what the next environment was, as each race took place in a different biome, with a special password to access them directly. I can still remember all the passwords and even now, Sean and I will use them as a shorthand for a particular game biome or just a reminder of the games we spent so much time playing.
When Lotus 3 came out it was more of the same, utilising both circuit and point to point races and a theoretical new prototype car the Lotus M200. Lotus 3 was good, but it didn't feel quite as smooth or fast as Lotus 1 or 2. I think the amount of stuff that had been squeezed into it maybe slowed it down a little bit. What Lotus 3 did bring to the party though was the RECS track creation system, which basically allowed you to put in a code of some sort and get a race based on that. Huge numbers of tracks available, which meant a huge amount of playtime. But we did step backwards to Lotus 2 a lot of the time as that was where the true challenge was.
I draw a line through the Lotus games towards other racing games like Burnout and Need For Speed and they're probably directly responsible for me eventually working at Criterion and shipping a bunch of Need For Speed games. Shaun Southern and Andrew Morris are responsible for me taking that career path, even if the work I do isn't directly related to making game systems themselves.
As I write this, a couple of weeks ago I bought an A500 Mini. The Lotus games were some of the first games that I put onto the system. And they're good. They're still as good as I remember them being and whenever I play them; I'm 14 again. And not many games bring that feeling back to me. Magnetic Fields, I salute you for a job very, very well done.