A full 13 years after its release — and a full decade after it kind of stopped working with my PC since hardware evolved and drivers did not — Interstate ’76 is finally back, as of today. Go to GOG and download The Interstate ’76 Arsenal, which includes the original game and its expansion, the Nitro Pack, as one collection — for a paltry $6.
That image kind of tells you everything you need to know about the game:
1) Cool cars.
2) With machine guns on them.
3) Add 1 and 2 for explosions.
4) Polygons! Polygons! Polygons!
There is also a great story, excellent voice acting throughout, and an incredible original funk soundtrack. In addition to the car combat, I76 has charm and personality to spare.
I don’t really know what it will be like to play this game again. I hope it holds up, and I think it will. I got completely into it when it came out, but I also came to see it as a symbol of everything that was right with gaming — and everything a game could offer me that other forms of entertainment could not. It was a deep interactive experience — tweaking your weapon loadouts, scavenging parts from destroyed enemies, playing online (oh, dial-up modems, I do not miss you), diving into the game’s fictional but tangible world.
I’m sure everybody out there has that game that gave them that same “games are unique and beautiful things” realization. The main difference for me is that I had already been working in the games media for four years and already felt strongly about the power of games. But I76, if you will pardon the pun, drove it all home for me. It was the total package of what I was personally looking for in a gaming experience, something I didn’t realize how much I wanted until I got to experience it.
So you can either take my ramblings as pure nostalgia, or you can try it out and see if you see what I see. I wrote a proper retrospective on the game (and caught up with its writer and lead designer, Zack Norman) for GOG, which is a little less of a love letter and a little more of what you can expect from it as a game today, and what made it special in the first place.
But for me, I76 is always going to be something like…well, an old girlfriend. I was completely smitten. We spent a lot of quality time together. And I feel nothing but love.
