Retrospective: Turbo Esprit

By Dan Whitehead Published 17 April, 2011

Where the streets have no aim.

You know that time has marched on when something that everybody did without really thinking finds itself categorised and pinned down by a catchy title. Take "emergent gameplay", for example.

Today, that's the fancy game theory term for players mucking about and making up their own rules, regardless of what the designer intended. In the eighties, that was just how we rolled, yo.

Maybe it was because so many of us were playing from hooky C60 tapes copied off a mate, or maybe it was because we just couldn't be arsed to read the two paragraphs of instruction on the inlay, but I'm convinced that most gamers of 20-odd years ago often had only the vaguest idea of what the goal of their favourite games were.

That was certainly the case for Turbo Esprit, Durell Software's hugely ambitious free-roaming car chase for the ZX Spectrum. It's a game with which I spent many happy hours without ever really knowing or caring what I was supposed to be doing.

Turbo Esprit still impresses in 2011. This is a 3D driving game set across four fully mapped cities, each packed with naturalistic details such as pedestrian crossings, roadworks, one-way streets and persistent traffic that actually follows the Highway Code and doesn't simply vanish once it's off screen.

5

Shield your eyes from the awesome force of SPECTRUM EXPLOSION.

All this is squeezed into 48k, a smaller file than you'd need for a JPG of the game's cover art. It's simple and rudimentary by today's standards, of course, but favourable comparisons to Driver and Grand Theft Auto, Esprit's genetic descendants, are as obvious as they are deserved.

Having picked a city from the four on offer (Wellington, Gamesborough, Minster and, er, Romford) you're free to roar around the wireframe streets at will. Roar, of course, being a relative term. As forward-looking as the game was, sound design is not an area where it excels.

The theme tune is a classic, a jaunty whistle-along number that has lodged in my brain for 25 years, but in-game the mighty Lotus was reduced by the Speccy's farting sound chip to little more than a series of clicks and quacks, like a duck being beaten to death with a Geiger counter.

None of that mattered. Nor did it matter that there wasn't really anywhere to drive to. You could go wherever you wanted, travel the wrong way down one-way streets, knock stick men off ladders and shoot your way out of dead ends by turning your machine gun on the queue of constantly spawning civilian cars blocking you in.

You took penalty points for civilian slaughter, but since hardly anybody knew or cared what the points were for, that didn't matter either. It was a pure a sandbox as it's possible to imagine.

2

Taking a right hand corner is more dangerous than any drug gang.

Control-wise there were some clever ideas. As well as shooting your gun, the fire button doubled as a handbrake. When it was pressed in conjunction with left or right your sleek sports car would hurl itself in the required direction.

Do this at the correct moment as you thundered through a junction and you'd instantly slip onto the new road without losing momentum. Get it wrong - as you invariably would - and you'd end up lodged horizontally across the street and forced to perform a laborious three-point-turn or, worse, you'd die instantly in a squelchy red fireball.

Turbo Esprit was produced with "technical assistance" from Lotus, though this was clearly a far cry from the exacting demands of todays relationship betwixt videogames and sports car manufacturers. The famous eighties vehicular icon looks more like a bar of soap on wheels and explodes at the slightest provocation, presumably not the thrilling endorsement the company was hoping for.

Even so, in an era when I considered Street Hawk to be the pinnacle of televised entertainment, Esprit's mix of navigational freedom and Russian roulette cornering was more than enough to scratch my gaming itch.

Every now and then I'd catch glimpses of the objectives I was supposed to be tackling, occasional spurts of colour in a two-tone world. But it never seemed as much fun as the anarchic fannying about I was already enjoying, so they remained mysterious.

The aim of the game, in actual fact, was to roam the streets looking for a gang of drug dealers. Text updates from HQ were meant to direct you to a specific map reference where the nefarious peddlers could be found.

Some five years before Tarantino, the crims even had their own colour coding. The car carrying the initial supply was red, the delivery cars were blue and roving hitmen patrolled the city in bright pink cars, clearly the game's equivalent of Steve Buscemi.

They had a fairly sophisticated network going on. Your targets weren't simply pootling around at random, but following specific routines that you had to decipher and disrupt in order to succeed.

Supplies would arrive at their intended destination, then delivery cars would set out to make the drop. Once they'd done their dirty deeds they were gone - and you'd failed. Even then, the game let you carry on, killing time (and pedestrians) until more drugs arrived.

3

The action carries on, even when you're looking at the map, making driving even more hazardous.

It's a surprisingly stiff challenge. In fact, firing Turbo Esprit up today, it's clear that playing the game properly is often borderline impossible. Narrow streets and randomly spawning vehicles on the other side of the road making overtaking a deadly gamble.

As such, reaching the drug cars on the map before they vanish relies is as much a matter of luck as judgment.

It's also easy to get lodged on corners if you take them too early, forcing a complete restart. And as civilian cars can box you in and never move you have to destroy them, racking up penalty points if not guilt.

What I love most about Turbo Esprit is that I was blissfully unaware of all this intrigue and inconvenience at the time. I played it endlessly. Even though I had the original cassette in its robust Durell clamshell case, complete with instructions, I somehow neglected to understand the core premise of the game for my entire childhood.

To me, Turbo Esprit was simply the "drive really fast around a city" game. At that, it excelled.

Even better, to my 10-year-old sister, it was "Picking My Daughter Up", a game that gave her the chance to live out the giddy dream of being a suburban mum on the school run.

4

Roadworks! Pedestrians! Street lights! What sort of fantastical virtual reality is this?

OK, so pink cars would occasionally turn up and try to shoot her, but this never seemed to bother her. I still wonder how my sister rationalised these sporadic drive-bys into her domestic fantasy. Maybe that's just what happens in Romford.

That she was able to co-opt a violent fast-paced crime game and turn it into something that appealed to her less visceral tastes is rather brilliant, though, and a fact that still amuses me to this day.

Ultimately, and much as with other pioneering 8-bit Britsoft classics, whether or not we knew what we were doing didn't really matter. Either by accident or design, Turbo Esprit hit on one of the key principles of video gaming. Namely, that telling the player how to play becomes a lot less important when the game is simply fun to play with.

It was easier in the eighties, of course, when we were just grateful for the ability to move blocky shapes around on the telly. But you can still see that ethos, lurking close to the surface of today's most popular open-world games.

Give us something to do and we're happy. Give us the space to do something of our own and we fall in love. And I still love Turbo Esprit.

Picture of Dan.

About Dan Whitehead

Dan has been writing for Eurogamer since 2006 and specialises in RPGs, shooters and games for children. His bestest game ever is Julian Gollop's Chaos.

Read more articles from Dan by visiting the Dan Whitehead archive page.

You may also like...

Comments (67) Latest comment 1 year ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Adge #1 1 year ago

    Loved this game as a kid and was very proud to find my 6 year old playing it on the spectrum emulator on my phone the other day with as much excitement as I used to have for the title.

    Great write up.

  • ToAks #2 1 year ago

    and here i thought this retrospective was about Lotus by magnetic fields, you know.. the hit from the early 90's ;) and not some obscure ZX80 game no-one has ever heard of :p

  • hilts #3 1 year ago

    Great write up , another blast from the past from great 80's c64 days!

  • Murton #4 1 year ago

    Love the retrospectives but have to say that when they're covering semi-obscure titles like this it loses a lot of its effect. Last year we had retrospectives on things like Dark Forces and Impossible Mission and it made me want to play these games again, but until reading this I hadn't even heard of this particular game and so the article just didn't have that same magical effect.

    Great write up all the same. I especially liked the opening paragraphs about not really knowing or caring what the objective of a given game was and just playing it for the sake of enjoyment, I wish I could still play games that way, I guess it's a kid thing.

    edit: negged for not having heard of a game that is nearly as old as I am and released on a platform I have never owned. Gotta love the way the karma system works.
    Edited by Murton at 17/04/11 @ 11:26

  • lucky_jim #5 1 year ago

    "Turbo Esprit is out now on retro" O_o

    @Toaks

    Turbo Esprit is not obscure, you young whippersnapper.

  • sega #6 1 year ago

    Actually I've never heard of it either - I thought this would be about Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge. You learn something new every day - although from the screenshots it looks like you're driving a hover car or something. I'm going to YouTube this out of curiosity now.

  • lucky_jim #7 1 year ago

    Why settle for Youtube sega? You can play it yourself by using the link for the javascript emulator on the game's World of Spectrum page.

  • sega #8 1 year ago

    I might do that actually, Jim. Looks interesting - and figured out the dashboard is just the interface and you control a car on the road, so explains the odd angle.

  • specular #9 1 year ago

    Please review Super Cars I/II on the Amiga, or Iron Man 4x4.
    These games are perfect for todays mobile market.

  • ToAks #10 1 year ago

    @lucky_jim

    Well i have been a gamer since 1980 , i was 5 then.
    So no, i don't see your point :)

    and in all honesty, never heard of this game... and i was an Vic20/C64/Amiga user in the 80's

  • lucky_jim #11 1 year ago

    Ah that explains it, you should have been playing Spectrum games instead, they were much better! ;)

    Ah, fanboy arguments ain't what they used to be.

  • kiantsu #12 1 year ago

    It's included in this collection:

    ZX Spectrum Elite Collection

    Among other 13 games. I got it a long time ago, back when it was free and included less games.
    Edited by kiantsu at 17/04/11 @ 11:55

  • jablonski #13 1 year ago

    Toaks - Unlucky mate. I still rank this as my favourite Specturm game ever. I was gobsmacked when I first played it.


    "Some five years before Tarantino, the crims even had their own colour coding."

    You do realise he took the colour coded criminals from "The Taking Of Pelham 123", from 1974?

  • barchetta #14 1 year ago

    Also available to iPhone gamers via Elite Systems speccy emulator.

    Certainly wasn't an obscure title in my area - it was a staple for months and definitely supplied some DNA in the 'GTA' evolutionary tree.

    Fond memories of simpler times: an afternoon of this, zzooom and atic atac on a day as warm and sunny as today would be verging on the melancholic!

  • jaguarwong #15 1 year ago

    A Speccy 48k was my first ever computer.

    Since then I've had a C128, a SNES, all the Playstations, a Dreamcast, both Xboxes, a Wii and more hand helds than I care to admit...

    And Turbo Esprit is still in my top 5 games of all time - I play it at least once every couple of months.

    Great write-up, thanks!

    Starstrike 2 next? Or Into the Eagles Nest?
    Edited by jaguarwong at 17/04/11 @ 22:19

  • Whitster #16 1 year ago

    Sorry to dissapoint but we don't get many drive-bys in Romford, thats more of a South London thing, we're East Greater London.

    Any idea why Romford was picked for this game along with the other citys? Were the devs based locally or something?

  • technicianTed #17 1 year ago

    I used to love this game.

    I remember buying it back then and spending hours on it.
    I also remember being told rob hubbard(c64 legend)done the beeper music as well, which he probably did.
    It was a catchy bleepy tune.

  • captain-future #18 1 year ago

    pfffff... read the title thought about Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge... was greatly disappointed at the first screenshots.

    *LOL*

  • BartsBlue #19 1 year ago

    Loved this game as a child. Am surprised that so many people actually have fond memories of this as well.

  • ziggy_played_guitar #20 1 year ago

    Shit, this was long time ago... :D

  • Ryze #21 1 year ago

    YEAHHHHH!!!!

    One of my ALL TIME FAVOURITES!! The first GTA!!!

    Loved playing this back in the 80s on my cousin's Speccy +3

    Wonderful.

    I used to play it in the exact same way as Dan Whitehead.

    Dan, doesn't this make the point that there are so many untapped game types out there that don't involve just running/driving around and shooting people?

    So many games could be easily be modified using their existing assets, and turned into more interesting games aimed at the audience that doesn't want all of their gameplay to revolve around pretend mass murder.

    There really should be several girls, and kids versions of 'GTA'. The game engine and assets should be used to create alternative locations and stories, and gameplay involving deliveries, dialogue, conversations, motion tracking, and other interesting puzzles incorporated into the world.

    The same goes for FPS games like CoD and Halo. There could be games easily put together that involve more than blasting enemies.

    Personally, I'm bored to death with most FPS games, and I expect the next GTA will just be drive, shoot, drive, shoot, drive... rinse repeat...
    Edited by Ryze at 17/04/11 @ 12:41

  • Scimarad #22 1 year ago

    I have very fond memories of this game and, like you, never had the slightest idea what I was actually supposed to be doing. I don't know why this would even be a related thought but this made me think of ATF as well. That was AWESOME!

  • Daikon #23 1 year ago

    I also thought this would be about Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge ^_^

    The closest I got to having a pre-GTA experience on the Amiga was playing an obscure game called "Hill Street Blues". Great fun shooting pedestrians. Does anyone else remember this game?

  • Tyronne #24 1 year ago

    Blimey, the times I would load that up and play `drunk driver` and just coast from one side of the road to the other and then run people over for no reason...the squeaks the pedestrians made haunt me to this very day.

  • Ferral #25 1 year ago

    Think I am going to dig out my Speccy99 disc I bought from HMV around 12 years ago, might work on Windows 7. It has thousands of games on the CD as well as the 48k & 128k emulator on it.

    Just put the Vice C64 emulator back on my machine with all the games which I got on a CD from HMV many years ago, emulator on the C64 classix is nowhere near as good as Vice though. Shortcut added to desktop now, time for some retro gaming when I get back in around 3pm this aft.

    Might actually hook my lappy up to my 48" LCD via HDMI and try a few of the games out that way. Wonder how big the pixels will look!!

  • Yuroko #26 1 year ago

    @captain_future
    Same here. Now that was a game. I've wanted a Lotus Esprit ever since then.

  • cynical #27 1 year ago

    I used to play this for hours, it was awesome..though (like the reviewer) I had no idea what to do. I remember that you could indicate when you went round corners...that was fascinating to me at the time :D

  • darkphoenix #28 1 year ago

    Loved this to ( 8 ) bits when I was a kid/teenager.

    Had to wait for "Driver" to have a similar experience.


    edit: and I admit that I didn't have a clue on what I was suposed to be doing.
    Just loved to cruise the citys, taking down "hit cars" and "armed cars", running over pedestrians, refueling,......
    Edited by darkphoenix at 17/04/11 @ 13:21

  • Xeopuppy #29 1 year ago

    Awesome game, I remember playing this on my spectrum, although I wasn't a kid, I was 18, that's when I could afford to buy a spectrum 48k+, in 1986, and i just used to drive around for hours, I vaguely remember what the game was about.

    Anyway great retrospective, makes me think of all the other great games I used to play on my spectrum, Skool Daze, Back to Skool, Tir Na Nog, Dun Darach, Marsport, Thanatos & Fairlight... So Many.

  • weebl #30 1 year ago

    I have it on my iPod and my PSP these days but I still wish I had my original tape (even if I can't use it!). I don't think there will be a time when I don't go back to it. It punched so far above its weight it even shows up some modern games these days.

  • Widge #31 1 year ago

    when is the face off happening?

  • makeamazing #32 1 year ago

    Love the retrospectives but have to say that when they're covering semi-obscure titles like this it loses a lot of its effect.

    This was a classic game on a very popular platform..and when i say popular, the spectrum was a massive platform. I am sure if they did a retrospective on any Nintendo game of the last 20 years, i would probably struggle to know anything about it, but that doesnt mean that many other people dont know about it. Also looking at the comments in their thread, there seems to be quite a few people who know about the game, so looks like the article is hitting the right audience ;).

    Anyway, getting back on topic... this was one of the many spectrum games that i didnt get very far in... if i remember correctly i had that Durrell hits box set... some great games on there. But looking back, games seemed alot harder to finish.. in fact i cant think of any that i did complete. Thats when hardcore was hardcore ;) though i did win 180 (darts game).

  • Ryze #33 1 year ago

    @Widge

    Well, there WAS a CPC version, and I know that GamesTM used to do three way face-offs with Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 games.

    Nicely, the Amstrad version would win many of these - unless the game was a dodgy Spectrum port!

  • Gideon813 #34 1 year ago

    "...and supplied some DNA in the 'GTA' evolutionary tree." I couldn't have said it better. Like obviously a lot of people I never knew what the point of the game was. Nevertheless a great game.

  • Gumersindo #35 1 year ago

    Ah! Days when we were young and innocent and 3-5 minutes loading... Wait, it's like nowadays XD

  • udat #36 1 year ago

    Awesome retrospective of one of my favourite games of all time. I can remember playing this for hours, and also never really bothering with the official goal. Driving through ladders was entertainment enough. What I loved about this game was how much it fired my imagination. At school all my mates were also playing this and the stories that were created around this game were amazing. I remember one kid* claming that he'd found one building that had destructible walls and you could then drive around inside a shopping centre smashing the place up.

    In my mind, this game didn't just have good graphics. It was real. I knew the graphics were basically crap, but in my imagination it was all real. The best graphics card, CPU and souncard of today get can't get close to that.

    *possibly me

  • Timotei #37 1 year ago

    "like a duck being beaten to death with a Geiger counter"

    Lulzor

  • sir_tripod #38 1 year ago

    For those with Java. :)

    Play Turbo Esprit Now!
    Edited by sir_tripod at 17/04/11 @ 15:55

  • barchetta #39 1 year ago

    @ToAks: if Turbo Esprit doesn't ring any bells, how about Siren City? Top down not 3d but similar premise.

    /is really beginning to feel like a grandfather of the gaming fraternity!

  • Redfive1983 #40 1 year ago

    I remember stopping at the lights like a good boy

  • filipo #41 1 year ago

    Had this on the Amstrad. Hard as nails.

  • agparrot #42 1 year ago

    Was just talking to Whizzo the other day about this, after discussing the Esprits in TDU2.

    What a great game Turbo Esprit was. or turbo esprit, as I remember the funky lowercase font from the loading screen. I did play it freeform for a long time, but eventually I also had a go at the actual missions - was brilliant that the various cars had different levels of armour and stuff, too - those pink fellows were faster, hardier and generally more menacing than the blue ones and the red ones, without the game ever having to resort to making the enemies indestructible to prolong the chases, or any of the other modern gimmickry that even the mighty GTA IV had to implement to make the chases fit the script in their 'open' world.

    The left-and-right lane changing as default, with the handbrake modifying this into full turns, did make for some scorchingly fast driving when you got it right, too - despite the cities being huge, you soon got a feel for when to turn on some of the more commonly used corners (either heading into one-way traffic for a shortcut, or on and off the 3-lane roads to try and catch your quarries at top whack).

    cli-cli-clickclickclickclickclick and you were there, 120mph of lunacy!

  • TaniumZX #43 1 year ago

    I loved playing this on my +2

    How about a poll to decide what retro games are revisited in future? Proper retro mind - pre 1990.
    Edited by TaniumZX at 17/04/11 @ 17:11

  • Miths #44 1 year ago

    Is the force feedback implementation for Logitech and Fanatec wheels decent in this game or is it a disaster of TDU2 proportions? :)
    Edited by Miths at 17/04/11 @ 17:15

  • udat #45 1 year ago

    I was just playing this again with the Java link up above. It has aged remarkably well. It's still fun tooling aorund the city. I even managed to kill 1 (one) blue drug car!

    One thing I noticed, the computer civilian cars are pacing along at 100 mph, which is far better than the crappy slowness of GTA AI cars which you can almost run faster than!

    Also, this Turbo Esprit can go from a standing start to 150 mph in 2.5 seconds. Nice.

  • Kaminari #46 1 year ago

    Give us more Speccy retrospectives, please.

  • O11Y #47 1 year ago

    I grew up with a ZX Spectrum and out of the 20 or so (pirated obviously) games that we possessed, we probably knew the rules to about 2 of those games...and one was essentially Pac Man.

    Good times.

  • Whizzo #48 1 year ago

    Turbo Esprit is my favourite Spectrum game of all time which is why I wrote over 1000 words on it when I picked it for the Retro Game of the Week a couple of years ago.

    Truly a ground breaking piece of gaming goodness and it's still really playable today.

  • RedPanda #49 1 year ago

    Post deleted at 14:31:59 28-01-2012

  • CaptainKid #50 1 year ago

    "Maybe it was because so many of us were playing from hooky C60 tapes copied off a mate"

    Indeed, or Disks in my case. But these days we are branded as criminals when we download a game.


    I thought this article would be about the Lotus game on the Amiga.

  • woosh #51 1 year ago

    Haha! I used to play this game at my grandads, I would go to bootfairs every sunday there was a regular seller there who had a box of spectrum games for 50p each and dad would let me have a couple! Then would take them to grandad's and play them on his spectrum!

    Good times.

  • smurphs #52 1 year ago

    Street Hawk! Good memories, along with Blue Thunder and Manimal. What was the one with the electric? Or holographic? Car...

  • DanWhitehead #53 1 year ago

    That would be Automan.

  • fiery_jackass #54 1 year ago

    what a lovely, redolent article. Five Stars

  • filipo #55 1 year ago

    @CaptainKid - nowadays it's a multi-million pound industry where hundreds of peoples jobs depend on you going out and buying their games. Back then the worst you could do was piss off some bloke in his bedroom who wasn't going to get his £20 that week.

  • Greebo #56 1 year ago

    Very spooky. Was passed by a C Reg Lotus Esprit today, which led me to bore the GF about Turbo Esprit. First time I'd thought about it in years and then Dan goes and writes an article on it! Stole 1986 from me :)

  • GamesConnoisseur #57 1 year ago

    Great Speccy retro article, I owned Spectrum 48k as my first computer when I was 12, avid gamer in the decades since! Remembered this game and yes stopped at all lights too!

    Fuuny thing is years later, when playing GTA3 on PS2, this was the game I kept recalling, and would agree that GTA's ancestor is this game.

    I been playing this once again on iPad thanks to Elite Speccy Collection HD.

    Keep it up, great that retro feature can go back to distant past and good for younger gamers to be filled in on the earliest forms of their favourite game, GTA open world, racing etc etc

  • 32768Colours #58 1 year ago

    Wow! What a quality blast from the past. I agree with the article that I hardly ever bothered playing the game properly, I had so much fun driving around and running into/over things it hardly mattered that there was a point to the game at all!

    Definitely going to get hold of this.

  • CaptainKid #59 1 year ago

    @filipo
    Exactly, a big company wouldn't notice me not buying their game at all.
    One guy working in his bedroom would.

  • just4funUK #60 1 year ago

    Turbo esprit was one of my favorite games on the spectrum 48K in the 80's. Lost many hours playing this. Great article.

  • Davemanz #61 1 year ago

    Cute bit about your sister, Dan

  • weebl #62 1 year ago

    @PS_2010: "3D has come a long way on the ZX Spectrum since Turbo Esprit hit the shops. Check this out:
    Pimp My Spectrum by Ate Bit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KegY8YIzQ4

    Towards the end, there is a 3D building effect."

    Interestingly, this demo uses a spectrum emulator at its base but they have improved the specifications of the machine. It's a bit like what a Spectrum II would be like if it ever saw light of day *wipes tear from eye*.

  • seanyboycorben #63 1 year ago

    Amazing game. I'd spend hours on this and a dragon game called Thanatos, made by the same company I think.

  • PixelPirate #64 1 year ago

    Turbo Esprit was the bomb, just like Dan I only vaguely understood what I was supposed to be doing and spent most of my time bombing around town making my own games up.

    I seem to remember once attempting to try and finish it properly...lasted about 2 mins and I was back to bombing around shooting cars and knocking people off ladders..

    Brilliant :D

  • f01re #65 1 year ago

    Fantastic game I spent hours just mucking around on like the author.

    Btw you can make the game crash by reverse cornering round one of the guys working on the lights. Still works now even with the emulators...

  • Kazama74 #66 1 year ago

    Pieces like this remind me why I've stopped reading other sites.Brilliant writing ! 'duck beaten to death by a Geiger counter' Lol.

  • glaeken #67 1 year ago

    I remember this. I am buggered if I can remember what I played it on though as I never had a Spectrum. I did have a Dragon 32 at the time (Not a large group of fan boys for that!!) so I think it had to be that. I do remember being vaguely aware of the objectives but it seemed rock hard and I don't remember ever getting far with it. Saying that I very rarely completed games back then and just seemed satisfied to just keep trying the early parts of the game.