Remembering a classic: World Rally 1993
- Drew Bentham
- 9 hours ago
- 2 min read
As I was watching this years Rally Sweden, seeing the rolling snow covered stages and the Toyotas flying through, I was reminded of an arcade game I once stumbled upon while on a family holiday. It's a typical British story, there was not much to entertain a young lad in the early 90's at one of the many holiday parks that were popular at the time. As we walked through, wherever we were, I clocked one of the arcade machines as I past. An actual bona fide rally game, right there in the lobby. To put this into context, in an era when you barely saw anything rallying, seeing an actual rallying game was mind blowing.
That holiday I spent as much time as I could playing that game, I bloody loved it. But In 2026 the name of the game had long gone, with just a vivid memory of the UI firmly lodged in the memory.
It only took a quick google search to find the answer. 1993's World Rally was the name. And long before Colin McRae would revolutionise rally gaming, OutRun and games like this was as realistic as arcade rally and racing games got. World Rally gave a birds-eye view but benefited massively from a main character car that was digitised directly from photos of a Toyota Celica GT-Four ST185.
The game also had some faithfully digitised audio samples from a real rally-spec GTFour and when you dropped your pound in and pressed start, you felt like the legend Carlos Sainz Snr himself sat on the start line.
World Rally was a spiritual evolution of the 1990 Carlos Sainz: World Rally Championship, where players observe from above and race across various countries by participating in a single race under a 60s time limit. Every location, composed of three stages each, had its own weather conditions and shortcuts to gain a time advantage.
The directions were on screen arrows as well as audio but they were clear and timed really well. Even the arrows had cut-outs to show obstacles like log piles. It had some tricky sections in it too. Trying to thread the needle under a narrow arch ended badly for me on a number of occasions.
The thing is, I wasn't alone. The game was widely well received across the world selling well. By 2014, it remained the developer, Zigurat's biggest hit.
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