Remembering classic games: Thrash Rally (1991)

Has there ever been a more evocative title for a racing game than Thrash Rally? This 1991 top-down arcade racer did exactly what it said on the tin: presented you with a bunch of rally cars and invited you to thrash them.

Given that our mental image of rally driving is of a single vehicle haring down a muddy forest track alone, Thrash Rally's stages were remarkably busy. You'd have to negotiate fellow competitors binning their own vehicles in front of you, helicopters buzzing the course and, in Kenya at least, the ever-present danger of colliding with an unsuspecting elephant.

Unconventionally for an arcade racer at the time, Thrash Rally was designed for more conventional joystick and button controls rather than a wheel and pedals, but that was still a suitably precise way to chuck these miniature motors around the various internationally themed stages.

Having sorted the slip-slidey offroad handling, Thrash Rally then proceeded to steal absolutely everything that wasn't nailed down from the real life World Rally Championship and Paris-Dakar Rally. The artwork for the game featured the uncanny (and more importantly unauthorised) likenesses of real-life drivers including Juha Kankunnen and, as an example, the Toyota Celica GT-Four was cunningly renamed the Toyot GT-Four. That'll throw them off the scent.

While Thrash Rally's natural home was in the arcade, if you were the sort of early 90s kid whose dad had a Porsche 930 Turbo and one of those enormous, boxy mobile phones, you might have been treated to a copy of this racer for the lavishly expensive and rare Neo Geo AES home console. A powerful machine for which arcade-perfect games could be secured for the eye-watering outlay of several hundred pounds apiece. It's almost ironic, then, that you can now pick up Thrash Rally for your Nintendo Switch for a mere seven quid. Take that, inflation.