What happened to... PowerSlide? (1994) - Every PC Rally Game

Channel:

VirtuaIceMan

Subscribers:

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Published on April 27, 2019 12:11:23 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5vQAuDKuoE

Game:

Powerslide (1998)

Duration: 5:12

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What happened to... PowerSlide by Maelstrom Games / Elite, 1994.

This would have been the first real rally simulator with accurate physics, except it got canned!

Images of the PC version come from PC Gamer and Unseen64 https://www.unseen64.net/2008/04/14/powerslide-fx-snes-unreleased/

There's extra information about the SNES version here: http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2018/07/feature_this_unreleased_snes_super_fx_racer_could_be_getting_a_physical_rebirth

Here's a link to a scan of the PC Gamer article from October 1994: https://imgur.com/CVOunZA

Finally, here's what the late Mike Singleton told me about the game:

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"Maelstrom were indeed involved with Powerslide."

"Afraid my memories of the PC version are rather sketchy (to say the least). Maelstrom Games were originally contracted to do the 3DO version and most of my recollections are to do with that."

"The core car physics engine that Elite were committed to using was originally a simulator written by people at Ford motor cars, to simulate their vehicles, and never really designed to be incorporated in a game of that era. The worst problem was that it was all in floating point, which was a big no-no on consoles then, and most PCs too."

"Bear in mind that back then, even doing a multiply on that gen of microprocessors took a lot more cycles than addition and divide a lot lot more. So the very maths heavy physics engine needed a lot of lightening 🙂 (and lightning if possible)"

"We approached that by using table-based logs and antilogs for multiply and divide, so they reduced to addition and subtraction and table based shifts for values to bring them into range for correct straightforward real addition and subtraction."

"We also introduced various maths tricks for the rendering etc, so that (for example) we could actually transform a vertex faster in software than the 3DO dedicated hardware 🙂"

"I know for sure I have no demos of it.... and I doubt if anyone else has. The programmer who worked most on it was Paul Hodgson."

"Sorry I can't give you a demo !!!"

"Maelstrom never took the project to completion with Elite, so if it did make it as Test Drive Offroad, it wasn't us and I have no idea whether or not it was released, sorry."

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This is part of the Every PC Rally Game playlist, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYDobL0b26ugFuXASCIC9qmFb9_k4_fqU

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