This 'brilliant and woefully under-appreciated' videogame was a Nineties classic

Ignition was another brilliant and woefully under-appreciated addition to the longstanding tradition of top-down racers featuring tiny, toybox cars. But whereas Micro Machines games typically turned things like breakfast tables and garden patios into racecourses, the tracks in Ignition were ostensibly set in realistic, mostly full scale locations. Well, as realistic as the image of a yellow school bus launching itself off an alpine ski jump can be.

The track design was the real highlight of Ignition, mainly owing to the fact that the layouts featured more drops than a dubstep DJ set. Whether located in American farmland or deep in the jungle, most circuits had you dancing along narrow cliff edges and featured at least one location where you could tactically elbow your opponent into some sort of ravine. It’s almost like Ignition took the scarcity of actual ridges in the game Ridge Racer as some sort of personal affront.

And if you weren’t trying to avoid accidentally slithering clean off the road, you were keeping an eye out for potential shortcuts and dodging obstacles that included freight trains, runaway minecarts and tornadoes.

It’s for this reason that it was even more galling that there were only seven tracks in the game. With races lasting just a handful of minutes each, you could see everything Ignition had to offer in around half an hour. Still, there was the added replayability of the two-player split screen mode, which has always been a bit of a rarity in PC gaming.

Simplistic it may be, but we’ve always had a soft spot for this chaotic racer, with its novel brand of knockabout racing. The fact that the logo for Ignition was a stick of dynamite, rather than a traditional car ignition, tells you everything you need to know about this firecracker of a game.