Driving a 2,400bhp, V12-engined car to beat... traffic? Why this 80s game is a classic

Road Fighter was not, as it sounds, the more ambitious sequel to Street Fighter, but instead an early top-down arcade racer from Konami. While it wasn’t the first game to represent driving from the dizzying perspective of a passing bird, Road Fighter’s astonishing sensation of speed certainly made it one of the more challenging.

It wasn’t really the road you were fighting at all, but congestion. Lasting longer than just a handful of seconds in Road Fighter required you to enter a sort of flow state, anticipating the constant stream of upcoming traffic like you were reading the cascading lines of code in The Matrix. Within moments of starting, the scenery was a blur as you negotiated point-to-point courses that occasionally narrowed to a wince-inducing two lanes.

And while the player car was allegedly a ‘Corvette’, the performance specs listed on the game’s title screen are a little suspect. Even in the decade of excess that was the 1980s, we don’t recall you being able to leave the Chevrolet dealership forecourt with a car that featured a V12 engine generating 2,400 horsepower. It’s no wonder that the in-game fighter jets and superheroes that fly past as you play struggle to even overtake you.

While Road Fighter might not be a name that’s immediately familiar to modern gamers, its legacy stretched for decades, with sequels that appeared under a variety of different titles including Konami GT, Midnight Run and Winding Heat. The final sequel, the Japan-only Road Fighters, was a greatest hits of Konami racers, including tracks from Enthusia Professional Racing and GTI Club, and arrived in 2010, 26 years after the original title hit arcade floors. Talking of legacy: over 40 years later, we still don’t have a production Corvette that puts out 2,400 horsepower. What gives, Chevrolet?

Arcade/NES, 1984