I have no idea how many hours I spent on this game growing up. There was just something about it that made it very engaging. Being able to easily make a brand new track and then either go racing or just fool around.

I've long since wished there was a spiritual remake, and thinking about it now I suppose Beam.NG could fit the bill if the editor was even simpler and the damage model was significantly reduced or even disabled. Been a good while since I played Beam.NG, guess I should check it out again.

But not after trying this out. Stunts FTW!

edit: my flashback made me totally forget to say I really enjoyed this writeup. I did a little bit of hacking like this back in the days, so can appreciate the effort.

Brøderbund was the publisher of "Stunts", but not the developer. The developer was Distinctive Software Inc. who had previously developed the hit games Test Drive and Test Drive II: The Duel for Accolade. For whatever reason, Accolade developed Test Drive III in-house, and DSI developed Stunts on their own.

After Stunts, DSI got bought by Electronic Arts. They were briefly "Pioneer Productions" (or at least, people from DSI were part of that group within EA) and made the original Need For Speed, but eventually became just a part of EA Canada.

In college, we went deep into this game. We realized you needed to have a closed circuit track for it to let you play, so we made a small circle track in the corner and the "real" track was off-road.

Then we could have half-completed banked curves, alternating banked curves where you had to thread the needle to not crash, etc. We used all kinds of bugs in our tracks. I remember you could drive over water if you were within 90 degrees of facing the fence, or get a bonus boost by hitting a jump at juat the right angle.

Sadly, we lost all our levels in a HD failure. But what a fun, buggy ass game. The best were the crashes where you'd "shoot the moon".

I played this game to death! I still fondly remember sending the purple lamborguinni to the moon :-) with the right combination of travck pieces.

I played this game long enough ago that I needed the LOD adjustment to hit 5fps. Nice write-up!

Aside: I would pay real currency for an official Brøderbund t-shirt. Probably not possible now. I always knew I would enjoy whatever game it was I was starting when I saw that ship logo and the 'funny O'.

It’s so weird how beloved and prolific this game was in certain spheres but that was just it, no sequel or anything.

Maybe the distribution was bad, never recall seeing it in a store was always pirated from kid to kid but we all had it.

I remember the thrill of hitting a wall at just the wrong angle and being transported into space by the collision "physics"... Wonderful stuff!

I’m always thrilled when someone posts something new about Stunts. I had such a good time with that game in college. :)

I loved this game so much

Great work!

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