“Learn To Drive . . . The dangerous way” with Car Wars in 1983
Steve Jackson Games’ Car Wars (find at Amazon.com*) makes an appearance in this 1983 advertisement from an issue of White Dwarf magazine. The game was only a few years old when this ad was new, and already the game had climbed the charts and was one of the favorites of gamers of the age. I learned to play with the three boxes shown in the ad, and looking at this makes me wish the game industry was as small and strange today as it was back then.
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One of my pals ran a Car Wars game at Con of the North (in MPLS) this past weekend. I didn’t get to play it, but he had Metro buses taking on traffic at a notorious cloverleaf here in the cities. It sounded pretty awesome!
These were like the blister-pack boxes, right? I remember them being really popular with a lot of table-top/RPG games back in the day. So cool!
@Kev Shaw – Yeah, these were the hard plastic “pocket box” packages.
Nice. I remember a friend of mine had the game Melee and it used a similar style of packaging. It’s a neat idea, as it makes it very shelf-friendly and works nicely to keep everything in one place…
Hey, there are still some small and strange corners of the game industry! (I agree that the free-wheeling nature of some of these old games can be hard to replicate, though.)
I worked for a number of years in the videogame industry and it was a similar field. When I started, turnaround on a game was less than six months with a team of maybe four or five people and development was more free-form and adventurous. You could take risks and come up with crazy ideas because, if it didn’t sell, you had another four projects also in development to cover its costs and the outlay was minimal.
By the time I left, we were working with teams of hundreds of people on projects that took years to develop. And, whilst there are exceptions, it was like the movie industry and the ”hey I know that thing!” line of product development that’s become so prevalent. Put simply, if it’s not branded with a product or a sequel, you’ll struggle to make an impact. And with that come all the associated restrictions required to ”protect the brand.”
I really miss the maverick spirit of the 70s and 80s…
I worked for a number of years in the videogame industry and it was a similar field. When I started, turnaround on a game was less than six months with a team of maybe four or five people and development was more free-form and adventurous. You could take risks and come up with crazy ideas because, if it didn’t sell, you had another four projects also in development to cover its costs and the outlay was minimal.
By the time I left, we were working with teams of hundreds of people on projects that took years to develop. And, whilst there are exceptions, it was like the movie industry and the ”hey I know that thing!” line of product development that’s become so prevalent. Put simply, if it’s not branded with a product or a sequel, you’ll struggle to make an impact. And with that come all the associated restrictions required to ”protect the brand.”
I really miss the maverick spirit of the 70s and 80s…
I should ask–are the Car Wars sets that are out now basically the same? Or are they entirely different editions?
@Kev Shaw, that sounds like a great time to be making games!