F1 Race, warm up your engines on Game Boy!

E therefore it was precisely the latter, in 1990, that followed the path of competitive gaming by releasing F1 Race for the little one in the family, the legendary Game Boy: this is a driving simulation title on paper, even though just a few minutes of play will be enough to understand how much the gameplay actually leans much more toward a distinctly arcade dimension!

Una first version of the title had already seen the light on Famicom (known here as NES, for the uninitiated) six years earlier, effectively relaunching a genre that for some mysterious reason has always had mixed fortunes on consoles: legendary games like Sega’s Out Run (1986) guaranteed lines of jittery kids armed with coins who couldn’t wait to play inside a crazy arcade cabinet shaped like a Ferrari cockpit, while many (though not all, to be clear) home titles struggled: but as with all rules, there is an exception and its name is Pole Position, in its day a true killer application, and that’s coming from someone who devoured it day and night on Atari 7800.

In such a scenario, the release of F1 Race on Game Boy became the classic breath of fresh air on a handheld console: no longer just little monsters to catch and evolve, but heart-pounding races on “liquid crystal” competing on original tracks, even though some of them deliberately resemble very famous international circuits.

F1 Race offers three game modes: in the first available, Grand Prix, we will face ten races with nine other opponents controlled by the CPU, competing with the aim of finishing in the top three positions in order to move on to the next level.

Nothing elaborate, no pit stops to worry about: one button accelerates and the other brakes, as the Game Boy school dedicated to simplicity has always taught. The second mode is called Time Trials and, as the name itself suggests, it is a series of time trials to improve your performance on the tracks, very useful in case we have difficulty placing on the podium in the “main” game.

But it is option three of the initial menu that gave voice to a revolution destined to have a following in the years to come and, I am not afraid to say, to lay the first solid foundations of the multiplayer game that we enjoy practically everywhere in the modern video game context. By selecting Multi Game and connecting three other consoles using the Game Boy adapter, in fact, everyone will be able to race together on the same track.

Chicca finale di F1 Race is the victory parade when you finish the game: waving to the crowd and parading past the smiling, leggy “race queens,” to pay tribute to you on your lap of honor you will see none other than Samus from Metroid in her combat suit and even Link, armed with sword and shield!

Like to say that, between one mission in space and another and the umpteenth saving of Hyrule by Nintendo’s heroes, there is always time to take a break and relax with a healthy, electrifying, and competitive racing game!

Get your engines revved up, the race is about to begin: hands on the wheel and, as they say in these cases, may the best win.