Retro Games Articles about: open world

Midtown Madness: The 90s Racing Game That Invented Open-World Driving

In May 1999, most racing games gave you a track, a car, and a countdown. [Midtown Madness] gave you Chicago. Not a corridor of barriers and grandstands, but an open rendition of a real American city — with traffic obeying signals, pedestrians going about their day, drawbridges rising and falling on their own schedule, and weather that slowly piled snow onto the roads and changed how your car handled. It was a different kind of racing game, and it arrived before anyone had quite worked out how to make one.