Street Rod

In November we played STREET ROD, a quirky little racing game that's all about 1960s hot rods, released in 1989 by California Dreams.

Sounds pretty American, right? Turns out, this game was actually developed in Soviet-controlled Poland, behind the iron curtain!

Learn all about what makes this game interesting in this episode of the DOS Game Club podcast.

Joining hosts Martijn ("Tijn") and Florian ("rnlf") for this episode are Oddvar ("dollarone"), Rob ("Spoonboy") and Jonas ("bitblt"). Also contributing is Jozef ("yozy") who sent a voice message.

Enjoy!

[ download mp3 ] (121 mins, 97 MB)

RELEVANT LINKS:

* Street Rod manual (PDF)

* Forum thread by "rasz_pl" explaining some of the interesting background on how this game was developed in 1980s Poland

* More background on Lucjan Daniel Wencel and his business endeavours (in Polish)

* Street Rod Online offering downloads of the original games for free, among other things

* Street Rod 3 development blog, which seems a bit inactive now

03 Jan 2021

2 Replies to “Street Rod”

Spacefarer says:
January 26, 2021 at 11:21 am

Great episode! Sounds like you had a lot of fun.

The way you describe it, it makes me think of a Flash game called Planet Racer, which seems like it was directly inspired by this game.

The gameplay loop is identical, i.e. you go to a planet (diner) and people come along to challenge you, you can either race for money or for their car, and it’s even a drag race!

Plus you have to race the King at the end…only difference is, you get to drive his car if you win.

ftrentini says:
February 18, 2023 at 11:42 am

I didn’t know about your podcast, but I was delighted with the show. Especially this episode that talks about a game that I spent the end of my childhood and the beginning of my adolescence playing. I think it was the game I played the most and that had the greatest impact on me during my childhood, because I’ve always loved cars and racing. So much so that I still work with it today. But in fact, there weren’t many people who liked it or many resources to help me finish it, so I had to learn everything in the few hours I could spend in front of the PC during the weekends. It was fun, I have good memories.

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