This classic game you've likely never heard of was PlayStation's answer to Daytona USA

The original PlayStation certainly wasn’t short of arcade racing games back in 1996 and, in particular, a remarkably faithful port of Ridge Racer had blown everyone away not long after the console itself. The one thing it didn’t have, though, was Sega’s Daytona USA, which was confined to rival console the Sega Saturn.

Canny French developer Toka spotted this gap in the market and decided to elbow its way into that space with a game called Burning Road, a name that, we’ll be honest, sounds like it was created with fridge poetry.

Burning Road was unabashedly a Daytona ripoff, from the sweeping banked turns of the first track, all the way to the near identical traffic radar on the right hand side of the screen. Perhaps Sega’s lawyers would have taken more of an interest if anyone had actually heard of Burning Road, but even at the time it was about as popular as contracting botulism.

But Burning Road was actually, whisper it, a pretty decent arcade racer if you were fortunate enough to stumble upon it in a bargain bin somewhere. Simple, drifty handling allowed for massive, low effort powerslides and the entire thing moved at an impressive clip. 

The three available tracks were also imaginatively designed, with weather that changed to rain or even snow at different points in the lap. Plus, our personal favourite feature, the cockpit camera included furry dice that swung around accurately based on your cornering. Where was that in Gran Turismo?

Still, in the interests of balance we must also mention the complete lack of a split-screen two player mode, the fact that crashing into a wall occasionally sped you up, the announcer doing incessant Ace Ventura impressions and what contemporary magazine GamePro described as the “worst theme song in video game history”. Go on admit it, you’re curious...