Remember those games you played as a kid that absolutely consumed you? Games that you played for hours on end? games that you tried to rinse every single ounce of content out of?

Flatout was one of those games for me. I knew nothing about cars in 2005 but driving and colliding at high speeds with slow motion segments whilst cheesy american rock played in my ear holes was enough for me.

The dirt being kicked up by spinning tires, the bonnets / hoods flying off as you pick up speed, the wheels wobbling as your ride gets increasingly beat up, and the insane crashes that would happen during every race were adrenaline pumping. Everything feels so physical and tangible in this game - every pebble and fence post has the potential to flip or spin your vehicle as well as any of the other vehicles. Nudging another driver into an approaching wall at the last minute is a brutal spectacle.

I don't think it's possible to explain how amazed I was seeing this run on a PS2 as an 8 year old. I'll say that again, a PS2. The physics simulations were so fun to play around with that I didn't mind restarting a race 2 or even 15 times sometimes. At times I would simply ignore the races to head off in my own direction and explore the race courses that were set in fun locations such as towns and lumbermills.

At some point I discovered a bug where if you could crash your car and force your driver to break past the map boundary you could create a really trippy trail with your drivers limbs similar to how the windows cursor can sometimes appear to duplicate / trail. I'd sit there repeating this bug for hours trying to get different effects out of my driver. It was this accidental discovery that really got me into exploring other games in detail and learning more about how assets are designed, placed, and how maps can be broken by the player. Whenever futures games would come out with a map editor or photo mode I'd always use it to try and get close to objects and see how they're put together. I owe all of that intrigue to a silly little bug I happened to come across in Flatout! I tried to recreate the original bug which involved me driving headfirst into a treeline but I couldn't seem to pull it off again.

I struggle to think of other games that have cemented their place in my brain as strongly as Flatout. The fun factor combined with the whacky physics result in an experience that is never the same each time you play and I guess that's what kept me hooked back then and it's what's kept me coming back nearly 20 years later. Did I mention there's some bonkers bonus games where you turn your driver into a bowling ball?