Surviving the Badlands

Badlands was a fun game released by Atari in 1989. It was a driving game where two players raced armoured cars around a hazard filled track. You could also unleash weapons on your opponent and upgrade your car. The action offered a kind of top down view on the whole track and so it took some concentration to keep your car going the right way.

It was reminiscent of the 1975 film Death Race 2000 with armoured cars which could be equipped with chain guns, shields, turbo boosts, tires, and extra speed as well as rocket launchers. By collecting wrench pick ups on the track you’d get to upgrade your vehicle between rounds. The game was set in a post-apocalyptic world, a kind of industrial wasteland known as the Badlands which was poisoned by nuclear fallout. The tracks had various hazards and players had to cross the finish line first by any means necessary. You could shoot other cars with your gun to slow them down or blow them away with a missile and there were also targets on the track which could be shot for bonus scores or weapon pick ups.

It was released as a stand up cabinet with two steering wheels, two fire buttons and two pedals. Two player games were always fierce competitions and you also had to compete against the drones. It was action packed and extremely violent.

Badlands was actually the last in the Sprint series of games which included Championship Sprint. They all featured a kind of top down view on a track which you had to drive around instead of giving you a view from within or behind the actual car. This meant some people would really struggle to stay on target and because all the cars were featured on the same screen and only delineated by colour. It was horribly easy for your eye to start following the wrong car.

Badlands introduced the idea of equipping the cars with weapons into the mix while the prequels were all focussed purely on the racing aspect. The ability to blow away your opponent or even slow them down by peppering their car with lead was a great development and something which Mario Kart and Wipeout would later use to great effect. I’m not sure what the first game to introduce weapons was, perhaps Spy Hunter but it was strictly single player. In any case Badlands was an early multiplayer example and it added a new dimension to racing against a friend.

The Sprint series was seemingly never ending and there were at least six games featuring the same premise but without the guns. Badlands failed to get great reviews and most reviewers saw it as an attempt to squeeze more life out of a well used license. Having missed most of the earlier games I actually remember really liking Badlands but there’s no denying it wasn’t great and racing games which feature a top down view of the whole track are not generally a brilliant idea.

It was still popular enough to get ports for all the home computer systems of the day from the ZX Spectrum to the Atari ST but it did mark the end of the Sprint series.