This is the fourth part in a series I’m writing on games that I played so long ago that I’d almost forgotten them.

I was twelve years old when they released the best vehicular combat game ever. Autoduel came out for the Commodore 64 back in 1985, and in many ways this game has never been surpassed. Obviously, the graphics were for crap by today’s standards, and they couldn’t include things like turrets given the simplistic controllers available at the time, but the game was a faithful interpretation of the Steve Jackson Games Car Wars rules, and it rocked.

In the post-apocolyptic future, areas between towns are dangerous – ruled by gangs with motorcycles and jeeps that have machine guns and missiles mounted on them. Men can be paid good money to deliver goods from town to town, although it’s very dangerous.

You started out in a small town with few options. The character you’d created had only three skills: gunnery, driving, and repair. You could enter a rookie arena fight using a free loaner vehicle or else take a bus to another town where you’d have equally little in terms of options. By entering a rookie fight in the arena, (amateur night) you could both gain cash and notoriety. Once you get enough cash, you can buy your own vehicle. Personally, I always took a bus to Atlantic City and gambled until I had enough cash. Quicker and easier. Got to love how gambling in old video games would put the odds in your favor.

Creating your own car is where the game really shone. You couldn’t create a motorcycle, but you could pick a compact, mid-size, sedan, luxury vehicle, or van. I think there were actually 3-4 more body types, but I can’t remember everything. In addition, you could install a number of different power plants, (electric engines) different levels of armor on every side of your car including the undercarriage, and a number of different tire types including standard, puncture-proof, and solid tires.

And then there were the weapons. Machine guns, recoilless rifles, rockets, flamethrowers, smokescreens and oil slicks, spikedroppers and mines, and the beautiful beautiful laser that never runs out of damn bullets. Although you had more space for weaponry on the luxury and van, I always liked building a sedan with a side-mounted recoilless rifle and driving circles around opponents. That and dropping mines – the AI was for crap, so enemy cars could/would rarely avoid those mines, and they rarely had the undercarriage armor required to withstand a hit.

So I’d drive up and down the eastern seaboard on courier missions, fighting other cars and generally getting killed because I couldn’t afford a clone. (which was essentially a save game) Yeah – the game was ruthlessly difficult. But it was damned good.