Back to the ’90s?
25 March, 2026 in Cars, Computers, Games
My passion for human-in-the-loop vehicle simulation was ignited in the late ’80s / early ’90s by two incredible Atari coin-op games: Hard Drivin’ and Race Drivin’.
For the first time, it was no more a simple “steer left / steer right” matter: Atari introduced a full vehicle simulation, where the challenge was to reproduce real driving manoeuvres to keep the car on track—whether in stunts or at high speed.
I spent countless hours playing those games. And they also inspired me to start a personal project in the early ’90s on the mighty Commodore Amiga, codenamed Impossible Drivin’ (yes… you can probably guess the reference)!
It was my first attempt at simulating a real vehicle in real time. It never became a full product and was never officially released. It featured a simple open-wheel car driving on a basic polygonal track, with just one goal: stay in control at high speed.
Despite its simplicity, Impossible Drivin’ laid the foundations for the following AVC simulation library and the Virtual Grand Prix series, implementing my early vehicle simulation algorithms. Even if, by modern standards, those algorithms were very limited, they were anyway able to capture the essence of fast driving. The model simulated the different behaviour of front and rear tyres, when pushed toward the limits of their friction circles depending on user input. The result was surprisingly fun: the car could easily understeer or oversteer, and the player had to react with the correct manoeuvres to control the vehicle and stay on track.
Even with such simple algorithms, it felt “realistic enough” to be genuinely fun to drive. In fact, my friends and I spent hours playing that early demo, even though it was nothing more than just a minimal sandbox experience.
A few weeks ago, while experimenting with the latest version of the Godot engine, I had a thought: what if I disabled the built-in physics and reimplemented those old Impossible Drivin’ algorithms?
Godot already provides so many features out of the box that recreating the project would be straightforward: just rewrite those few lines of C code in GDScript for the car physics, and let the engine handle everything else (3D, input, etc.).
Well… here it is: the IDFG Project — Impossible Drivin’ for Godot.
And yes, the goal was fully achieved.
The car is extremely fun to drive. I would even say it feels more enjoyable than many modern, full-featured simulations.
Driving in IDFG brings back those ’90s vibes—when simulators were realistic enough to reward good driving, but not so extreme that they became frustrating or intimidating.
Instead of tweaking endless parameters, you just jump in and enjoy throwing the car into corners.
So now the question is:
what’s next?
Should this remain a simple demo, or is it worth turning into a full game with those retro vibes?
