Have you ever been a policeman, chasing criminals in your car and ramming them off the road in daring high speed pursuits?
I have.

Of course, I'm talking about my experience of the racing game Chase HQ, not real life!
Attempting to ram criminals off the road in a 1971 Mini Clubman would be an utter disaster.

Chase HQ, released by Taito in 1974, was one of the very first driving games, and today the genre is still going strong.
One of the biggest revolutions in racing games was polygons, which permitted 3D objects to exist in the mind of the computer. Prior to the birth of polygons, racing games had to simulate depth with flat pictures and a lot of blurring and shaking.

But the internet marked the biggest change in racing games - finally racers could compete against other humans in multiplayer matches, rather than computer controlled super robots.

And thanks to the internet, the WOW for the most racing game players on a race track now exists, set by players of TrackMania Nations Forever on the evening of July 2nd, 2008:
At 08:23pm, a mind-boggling 37 gathered on a track named 'Harold's Mouth' and raced around!

WOW!