Acid Software were a New Zealand developer who spent the early 90s making games for the Amiga that understood something a lot of their contemporaries didn't: that a top-down racer lives or dies on its handling model, and that getting the handling model right is harder than it looks and more important than almost anything else you could spend your development time on. Skidmarks in 1993 proved they knew what they were doing. Super Skidmarks in 1995 proved they could do it better.

I played it on the CD32. It is one of the best things on that platform and one of the better top-down racers I have played on anything, which is a category I have strong opinions about. The cows help, but the cows are not why it's good.

What It Is

Top-down racing, isometric perspective, up to four players in split-screen. You race vehicles around circuits that range from standard tarmac to more inventive layouts with jumps, tight hairpins, and obstacles designed to punish complacency. The vehicle roster includes conventional racing cars and rather less conventional options: beach buggies, big rigs, caravans, and cows strapped to wheels, which handle exactly as entertainingly as you would hope and slightly better than you would expect.

The name is not subtle about what the game prioritises. Momentum, drift, and the gap between having control and losing it are what Super Skidmarks is built around, and the tyre marks left across every corner are both visual record and practical information, showing you where the racing line is, where it isn't, and where someone came off the track badly enough to leave an extended black streak across the grass.

The Handling

This is the thing. The handling model has weight and consequence. Each vehicle class handles differently in ways that are legible and learnable rather than arbitrary. The racing cars reward precision and punish overcorrection. The heavier vehicles carry momentum in ways that require a different approach to braking and cornering. The cows are, somehow, genuinely competitive in the right hands, which required either a surprising amount of playtesting or a very lucky accident, and either way the result is correct.

The caravans are the outlier. The caravans are not genuinely competitive. The caravans are there for a different purpose, which is to create chaos in multiplayer by introducing a vehicle that is almost impossible to drive cleanly and hilarious to watch someone attempt. This is a legitimate design decision and one that pays off every time.

Multiplayer

Four players, split-screen, same machine. In 1995 this required a CD32 that could handle the split without the frame rate becoming genuinely unplayable, and mostly it could, mostly being a word that covers a multitude of situations in Amiga CD32 performance discussions. The important thing is that it held together well enough, which is all multiplayer split-screen needs to do to enable the thing it's actually for.

The thing it's actually for is sitting in a room with people you know and producing the specific combination of competitiveness and laughter that top-down multiplayer racing generates better than almost any other genre. Someone will brake too late into a corner and take out two other players. Someone will discover a shortcut that works once before everyone starts using it and it stops being a shortcut. Someone will choose the caravan and everyone will understand why before the end of the first lap. This is the experience and Super Skidmarks delivers it reliably.

How It Looks and Sounds

Clean and bright, which is the correct aesthetic for this type of game. The top-down perspective keeps the track readable, the sprites are detailed enough to be distinctive without cluttering the view, and the colour palette is cheerful without being aggressive. It looks like a game that is confident about what it is and has no desire to be anything else.

The soundtrack is upbeat and functional, doing the job of keeping energy high without demanding attention. The sound effects are good: engine noise that varies by vehicle class, tyre screech that tells you something useful about your current speed and cornering angle, collision sounds that are satisfying without being cartoonishly over-emphasised. The audio does not overclaim. It supports the game rather than performing alongside it.

Where It Sits

Super Skidmarks came out the same year as the Mega Drive port, which expanded the audience beyond Amiga owners and is a reasonable version of the game if that's what you have access to. The Amiga CD32 version benefits from the CD audio and is the one I know, so it's the one I'd recommend as the place to start if you have options.

In the lineage of top-down racers it sits alongside Micro Machines as one of the genre's better examples from the early 90s, and ahead of most of what was competing with it on the Amiga specifically. The handling model is the reason. You can make a top-down racer that looks good and has interesting tracks and varied vehicles, and if the handling model is wrong none of it matters. Acid Software got the handling model right, and that is ultimately what Super Skidmarks is remembered for by the people who remember it at all.

The cows are a bonus.

Super skidmarks joystuck 4
Super skidmarks joystuck 3
Super skidmarks joystuck 2
Super skidmarks joystuck 1

Super Skidmarks Release Details

Release Year 1995
Genre Racing
Platforms Amiga, Amiga CD32, Genesis
Publisher Codemasters Software Company Limited, The
Guildhall Leisure Services Ltd.
Developer Acid Software

Super Skidmarks Useful Links