We Totally Did the Donut Jump Before Red Hot Chili Peppers

...I remember saying that the first time I saw the video for Californication sometime in 2000.

Towards the end of my time with Atari Games (then Midway Games West) the San Francisco Rush time was rolling off multiple successes with Arcade and Console franchise games, and continuing the adrenaline-infused white-knuckle 8-way Arcade racing with Hot Rod Rebels, which unfortunately was cancelled coincident with the shuttering of coin-op Arcade development at the Milpitas office.

Hot Rod Rebels leaned into Lowbrow Kustom Kulture and Rat Fink style muscle cars, and every 3-lap race started with a quartermile straightaway and classic drag race 'Christmas Tree' lights which were to be displayed both on the screen, and incorporated into the cabinet with LED lights. We enhanced our driving model to accommodate this drag race, allowing multiple ways of launching without the penalties of false starts or loss of control. I remember popping wheel stands off the line, stomping on the gas, or redlining the tach and popping the clutch for an 'optimal' start. I think we also planned to have burnouts to 'cook the tires' before the race started.

We were definitely getting sub-10 second times, down to the thousandth of seconds.

Besides the Christmas Tree starting lights, the Arcade cabinet also had other Kool features:

• "Lake Pipes" exhaust tubes on either side of the seat with red LEDs inside
• "Barefoot" gas pedal
• "8 Ball" gearshift knob
• "Signature Seven Speaker Surround Sound" - one high up in the marquee, two in the dash, two in the headrest of the seat, one in the back of the seat, and one subwoofer under the seat
• The back of the seat also had two brake lights; not that you'd ever see them lit

At the end of its development, Hot Rod Rebels had six track layouts in various states of completion, each one helicopter-flipping over the boundaries of Arcade racing. Each track featured over-the-top signature stunts and shortcuts made more flexible and spectacular by our new dynamic collision technology, allowing our cars to drive on and interact realistically with large moving objects.

It was a long time ago, but I vaguely recall:

1. Rodsville
A very simple 'oval' track layout; two straights and two left turns. Downtown Rodsville had a car wash, diner, garage, and police station.

The signature finish-line stunt was the "Up-n-down Donuts" drive-thru, an homage to the iconic Randy's Donuts in Los Angeles, CA as well as an obvious play on SoCal's famous "In-n-out Burgers". I came up with the design of the building and the stunt, just thinking, "what would be cooler than simply jumping through a giant donut?" Why JUMPING THROUGH A GIANT DONUT DUNKING UP AND DOWN INTO GIANT CUP OF COFFEE of course!

You can see in other YouTube videos the other ways we used dynamic collision in stunts:

• A car carrier on the roadside allows racers to jump over and onto freight trains going with and against the flow of traffic
• A county fair with a shortcut jumping across the path of a swinging 'riverboat' ride
• Other amusement rides - carousel, and the 'hammer swing' - were also interactive

The other tracks were less developed, but the basic track ribbon had been built, tested, and tuned for multiplayer, as well as filled with stunts and shortcuts.

2. Island - set against the backdrop of a volcanic Polynesian island, the 3 laps saw racers interacting with the signature Volcano in different ways:

• Climbing up a winding mountain road or taking the 'vertical tube' stunt shortcut - a prototype can be seen in the Rush2049 morning track - and speeding past the smoking vent
• Diving down into the tube in the second lap to land on a ledge before the rising lava engulfs the exit tunnel
• Finally jumping over the eruption on the third lap and bombing down the steep backside

3. Canyon:

• Falling boulders
• Double corkscrew inside a massive cavern with hanging stalactites that could be dislodged and fall down to form obstacles in subsequent laps
• High-rising hairpin turn around across a fragile keystone

4. Swamp:

• Winding road through the mangrove swamp - skirting close to the exposed roots would topple 3 giant trees. These trees would collapse and fall down to become a shortcut of narrow bridges in later laps
• A giant tree-cutting machine spanning the entire final straightaway - think about driving under a giant lawnmower, but with mechanized circular saw arms
• A giant teeter-tottering fallen tree. racers leading the pack would tip the log forward, exposing a death wall to slower racers, followed by a secret underground tunnel shortcut

5. City:

• Some kind of recycling facility with a multi-lane conveyor belt and sloped quarter-pipe sides. Recall that Dragon's Lair's marble sequence was the inspiration for this section
• A building scheduled for demolition; cut through doglegs in early laps, just barely clear the debris cloud as slower racers watch it collapse

6. Mountain

• Intrinsically different than the other tracks, the snow-capped Mountain track was a simple point-to-point starting at an elevation of about 2000 feet above the finish line
• The quartermile start had about an 1/8 of a mile padding afterwards before ending abruptly. Keeping your foot on the gas meant that you would freefall downwards about 10 seconds before impacting in the valley. It was actually much faster to brake hard just after the end of the 1/4 mile straight and fall maybe a hundred feet onto the extreme sloped cliff - think of the Track 5 freefall stunt on lap 3
• The signature stunt for this track was about a 15% success rate. A single-propeller plane slowly circled the top of the Mountain, and could be perfectly aligned with a car hurtling off the end of the cliff by simply pausing a few seconds at the start of the race. Soaring through the air about 2 seconds and literally skimming off the slightly-curved wingspan of the plane flying perpendicularly to the direction of the car allowed the lucky racer to fly another 3 seconds to land on the side of another mountain!
• There was an amazingly simple downhill section with a constant slope. The zig-zagging asphalt racing path gave far more traction than the flat snowy and icy ground on either side, and it was fastest to try to catch as much asphalt as possible
• The downhill section continued into a cavern section with giant rock formations. Dodging between and around these obstacles with other aggressive racers often resulted in crashes
• I remember the race taking at least 6 minutes. There were many hairpin turns both on the inside and outside of cliffs

My favorite memory of the development of Hot Rod Rebels was the Playground: a collection of stunts, shortcuts, and geometry that we could teleport around. At the time, legendary Game Designer Mike Hally was in the same building, and so was. He showed me some of the maps from the Arcade skateboarding game, 720. There was a 720 machine in the building, and it was super fun tearing up the skate parks so I recreated one of them in our Playground and drove around on it!

It didn't work so well to freestyle around on the skatepark, so I envisioned it as a shortcut path with a descending ceiling that would crush some of the paths, and close off others.

Thanks to everyone who worked on the Rush Team over the years! Even though Hot Rod Rebels never made it to production, I had a ton of fun working on it.