sports

The sport of rally racing is simple and accessible: you take a cheap city car, give it some all-terrain tires, and throw it down a hair-raising man-versus-nature gauntlet of winding dirt roads with a copilot shouting directions in your ear.

There are no laps, no other drivers, and no pit stops. Unfortunately for fans, there’s also no more interest in the sport—or at least, not much. Manufacturer participation and viewership have both been in freefall for decades.

Parking Garage Rally Circuit Official Gameplay Trailer – YouTube

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So it’s kind of baffling that we’re living in a golden age of rally video games—at least if you look at the indie scene. Smash hits abound, from 2020’s highly stylized Art of Rally to 2022’s gritty PlayStation 2-vibed Rush Rally 3 and 2024’s white-knuckle ode to public infrastructure Parking Garage Rally Circuit.

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Not only do these games bring the thrill of off-track racing back to life; every single one also comes charged with its own flavor nostalgia for a bygone era, a pre-Y2K time that many of the genre’s core fans, and even some of its developers⁠, are too young to have experienced firsthand.

Meanwhile, in the triple-A space, EA recently announced that its subsidiary developer, Codemasters, is pulling out of rally racing after an iconic quarter-century run of games based on the sport.

The motorsport is in an all-time slump, and an enthusiast car market once saturated with homologation specials⁠—that is to say, race-ready cars you can buy directly from the manufacturer⁠—now has basically zero road-legal rally cars for sale.

If rally is a dying art, then why are there so many indie racers to choose from? Formula 1 racing has utterly exploded in popularity over the last half-decade. But despite that motorsport’s fanbase nearing 1 billion people, sales of indie track-style racing games patterned after F1 and the like don’t show a similar success (though I do have to shout out New Star GP).

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Pick up and play

(Image credit: Brownmonster Limited)

Part of the magic with all these indie rally games is, like with the broader indie renaissance, you can run any of them on a cheap PC from the early 2010s or similarly low-spec device. I logged all of my Art of Rally hours on a three-year-old phone, and #Drive Rally (my most recent obsession) runs buttery smooth most of the time on my MacBook Air.

And even if you’ve never driven a car in your life, there’s something addictive about sliding your car through a snowy Finnish wood in Rush Rally 3, around a rainy Japanese mountain switchback in Art of Rally, or down a sandy American desert valley in #Drive Rally.

Like a tight platforming roguelite or an Elden Ring speedrun, the appeal of rally is incredibly simple: one tiny mistake and your brilliantly executed run is over. There is very little grip, and the roads are little more than a car-length wide. Every jump is heart-stopping, every turn is a coin-flip where you either face heartbreak or experience the thrill of an e-brake drift you didn’t know you had in you.

Each game brings a different pleasure. Art of Rally is a well-curated, sepia-toned love letter to the classic era of the sport (the 1960s-’80s); Rush Rally brings a Gran Turismo level of car tuning, customization, and sim-like handling; and Parking Garage Rally Circuit takes tight, colorful ’90s arcade racing (and music, and vibes) to a whole new level.

Each game, while fundamentally designed around similar mechanics, is its own unique portal to a different world—maybe one you grew up in, or maybe one you missed out on.

Car culture

(Image credit: Funselektor Labs)

Rally the sport carries a similar ethos and anarchic spirit to PC gaming. If a new Ferrari is a flashy 5-figure prebuilt with a custom RTX 5090, a rallied-out 200k-mile Subaru Impreza RS2.5 with a back seat delete is a DIY people’s champion running a secondhand GTX 1060 and a 7th-gen core i3 found in your local e-waste bin.

Art of Rally’s car details highlight this—they start off with descriptions like “originally designed to fit more grocery bags than the competition” and “the French take on the 4-door family car.” That’s what makes rally cars special: They were nearly all based on cheap econoboxes—that is, entry-level, no-frills hatchbacks and sedans—like the iconic Ford Escort Cosworth.

In a word, rally is accessible. I don’t mean that becoming a rally racer is super-easy and approachable—although there was a rallied-out Impreza that used to frequent my local cars and coffee meetup⁠—but rather, the culture of rally is accessible.

Rally appeals to me because it is a very pure expression of ‘you and your machine vs the terrain’ without the other cars to contend with.

Tim “Walaber” FitzRandolph

Average people like you and I cannot buy an F1 car and drive it to work. But we live in a world where we could buy a rally car for $25,000 online or at a local dealership. That fantasy can become a reality.

Art of Rally creator Dune Casu, who has actually attended rally races in-person, shows that this cultural approachability dovetails with indie rally games’ simple mechanics: “Art of Rally has found a sweet spot where it seems to be a way for people who play the sim rally games to relax and play more casually.”

I think it also gives people who’ve never played a rally game a chance to experience the joy of the genre without a deep dive into the technical skills and equipment that sim racing requires.

Casu shared a perspective that resonates with me, that the “zeitgeist” of rally “stems from the rally footage from the early days,” with “iconic cars”—seriously, I encourage you to search Group B Rally Cars on your nearest search engine—and “drivers that were more akin to fighter pilots.”

Another level

(Image credit: Walaber Entertainment LLC)

What’s more, developing a rally game is also much more accessible for your average enthusiast. I asked Tim “Walaber” FitzRandolph, Parking Garage Rally Circuit’s creator, for his thoughts on the recent explosion of indie rally racers. He originally came up with the idea for PGRC in a Ludum Dare game jam.

“Retro rally is a nice indie-friendly game type because of the simple focus on car handling and terrain without needing the large scope to compete with AAA games,” explained FitzRandolph.

Dune Casu shared a similar perspective, one that’s become a bit of a refrain in an era of triple-A mediocrity and thrilling independent development: “Indie rally games aren’t bound by the same rules and are usually made with lower budgets and smaller teams, which means we can take more risks.”

“I’m not an avid racing fan,” PGRC creator FitzRandolph revealed when I asked what separates rally from other motorsports. “Rally appeals to me because it is a very pure expression of ‘you and your machine vs the terrain’ without the other cars to contend with.

“In a way, I think it’s similar to Horror and Roguelikes in that it’s a genre that provides lots of replayability without needing tons of production cost to develop, has an audience, and is not competing against AAA, which is the sweet spot for indies!”

But I think there’s something even deeper than this accessibility to the digital rally revival. The rise of everyman rally racing games captures this memory, partly real or fully imagined, that we have of better days—of raw, unrefined, unpretentious fun. Retro cars, like early gaming consoles, film cameras, vinyl records, and my personal favorite audio medium, cassette tapes, all carry the soul of a semi-mythical simpler time.

Art of Rally deftly captures this sunset glow of nostalgia, radiant on its off-brand Lancia Stratos and Audi Sport Quattro. The rush of Rush Rally 3’s motion-blur, throwback graphics, and sim-like handling give 9/10ths of the same hit as Gran Turismo 3’s dirt stages. Parking Garage Rally Circuit’s Ska bangers, blocky polygons, and bright colors would make any grown-up car enthusiast feel like they’re back in the ’90s. Real-world rally may be fading, but long live the indie rally racer.

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