ATV Offroad Fury

The preload is the whole game. Pull back on the stick as you approach a jump, feel the suspension compress, then let go at the lip and the quad launches with a snap you can hear in the engine note. Get the timing wrong and you either clip the crest and nose-dive or leave half your height on the table. Rainbow Studios had already built this idea into Motocross Madness on PC, and moving it to a console pad in early 2001 turned a simulation flourish into something closer to a fighting-game input, a move you drill until your thumb knows it.

What surrounded that trick was more generous than the PS2's first months usually managed. Closed circuit racing, enduro runs over long stretches of open terrain, freestyle scoring for tricks, and a free-ride mode that just handed you a landscape and let you go find the far corner of it. The terrain deforms under the tires, the draw distance holds up on the desert and snow courses, and the frame rate stays steady in a launch window notorious for chugging. Sony bundled it with hardware often enough that a great many people who bought a PS2 in 2001 own it whether they remember or not.

The rider physics are the other signature. Crash and the body separates from the machine with a limpness that was funny then and is still funny now, cartwheeling down a hill while the quad bounces off in its own direction. It punishes you lightly, since respawns are quick, but it also communicates something the handling model wants you to understand: you are a small unsecured weight balanced on a heavy one, and the two of you have different opinions about what happens next.

Age has been kinder to the handling than to the presentation. The menus are flat, the licensed nu-metal soundtrack dates the disc to the month it shipped, and the AI riders keep to their lines with a discipline no human opponent will show you. But the actual business of carrying speed through a rutted corner, weighting the back end and picking a landing, holds together twenty-odd years on because it was built on a real model rather than a set of scripted boosts.

The sequels added riders, tracks and online play, and they are the fuller packages. This one is leaner and clearer about what it wants from you, which is a single well-timed pull on a stick, over and over, until the hills stop being obstacles and start being ramps.