Action Supercross

An excellent Hungarian motorcross game, that spawned a whole scene of worshippers throughout the world.

The game was created by Balasz Rozsa and his brother Csaba.

The whole purpose of the game is to drive your bike around a track and collect all the apples before you hit the flower to complete the track.
Simple as this may sound, the game is really addictive.

The game also had a sequel called Elastomania that never got as much attention as the original.

"Action Supercross", whilst being laughably simplistic, is also hopelessly addictive, it's true.

At one point about 3 years ago the entire Guildford videogame development community (ostensibly working on much more 'complex' stuff like 'Black and White') were hopelessly addicted to it.

Anyhow, the 'coolier-than-thou' Rockstar Games (of 'Grand Theft Auto' fame) actually licensed the 'Action Supercross' engine for their Gameboy 'Evil Knievel' game.

This seems to be a relatively unknown fact, mainly cos 'Evil Knievel' was RUBBISH. Apparently someone failed to realise, presumably after licensing it, that the fun in Action Supercross is the fact that you're juggling physics and rotation, and the bike is moving pathetically slowly for a 'daredevil' game. I can imagine the scene now, showing it to Mr.Knievel himself and him saying - 'i don't remember moving at 3/4 miles an hour during all my famous stunts'.

Hence, they speeded it up. hence, they completely messed it up. ign.com gave it 2/10. oh dear.

..and then they re-used it, still arsed up, for the _awful_ Austin Powers Gameboy game, complete with fake Windows O/S, that I unfortunately own.

But the original PC game itself is amazing, and there's even 'Action Supercross' clans which fight for the fastest times on tracks and hold competitions. Isn't that scary?