Playing Wreckfest while learning to drive was surprisingly helpful

Image credit: THQ Nordic

At 9 years old, in the plastic seats of a Sega Rally arcade machine, I quickly learned that “automatic” is better than “manual” without understanding why. And now I know: changing gears is a fucking chore. This year, in my mid-thirties, I finally learned to drive. And weirdly, a racing game about destroying clapped-out old bangers helped me along. Thank you Wreckfest, for all the bottled road rage you allowed me to unleash.

When I say “helped” I don’t mean that this aggressive racing game taught me how to reverse safely around a corner or calmly navigate a roundabout. Wreckfest has been helpful as an outlet for the anti-calm that would envelope me after any given driving lesson. Driving – in case you have been doing it for years and have grown a thick layer of contempt – is massively stressful. Wreckfest, although it’s now old enough in gaming terms to have a sequel in the works, remains a perfect method of letting loose, of understanding the overwhelming concern that comes with manipulating 1.5 tons of fast metal, yet being able to say: nope! Not here.

Wreckfest – Official PC Launch Trailer

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You can slide round dirt tracks in a battered station wagon. You can get in a fight with twenty combine harvesters. You can drive a “battle bus” with a big metal cow catcher installed on the front and yeehaw your way to 24th place by driving the wrong way around in online multiplayer, looking to de-road the leaders as they swerve to avoid your vengeful acts of public transport. It has become one of my favourite games this year, despite the fact it came out in 2018.

John called it an “antidote to po-faced racing sims” when it was released. But I only discovered it while writing our list of the best racing games. Now that I was finally informed about the button that operates hazard lights, I was content to take on this list. I downloaded Wreckfest as happy research and immediately relished the hellish joy of ramming into a rival on a corner. I recognised the happy transgression in doing the exact opposite of everything I was being slowly and expensively taught, week after week.

Image credit: THQ Nordic

The secret to learning how to drive, someone on the internet said, is to forget that what you are doing is incredibly dangerous. You have to know it at a deep level, that you are ploughing the tarmac with a machine that kills and injures thousands upon thousands of people every year. But you also have to put that knowledge aside and just do it, while trusting everyone else around you to drive as a fellow danger denier, unconsciously informed of their fragile bones but seemingly unbothered. Every now and again, while driving on the motorway, I still think: my god, what are we DOING!? In many ways, mass driving is the perfect metaphor for the wilful ignorance of mortality that accompanies all humans day to day. La la la, we sing to ourselves as we forget about death again, dum-dee-dum. There’s a reason people develop amaxophobia, the fear of driving, and it is a more rational phobia than many of us care to admit.

Games like Wreckfest (and the Burnout series, lest we forget) are perfect stress relief for a life confined not by the regulations of the road, but by fear. Some thalassophobes playing Subnautica will discover that stepping into abyssal aquatic terror offers a kind of release. So too does the stressful driver get relief from joining a multiplayer server titled: “Fuckfest! All cars allowed! No rules!” It’s not (just) about throwing the normal rules of driving into the bin. It’s about throwing away your fear of messing up in the most mortal way. The helmet-wearing drivers of Wreckfest can get squashed and compressed into funny shapes as the vehicle crumples impossibly around them, or they might ragdoll comically into the sky when ousted from their lawnmowers. But you are rarely more than a 3-second-long press of the ‘reset’ button away from being back on the track. You have a health meter, but nothing here can hurt you. Ah, video games.

Image credit: THQ Nordic

Northern Ireland, where I’ve learned to drive, has a bad history of boy racers who cause deadly accidents in search of a minor thrill. Dangerous driving IRL is not some laudable thing. I’ve already nearly crashed twice because of speedy shitheels, and neither time did I think: “haha, cool”. Yet even while I obviously think it unwise to fly down a stretch of asphalt at 100mph on roads that were seemingly built by The Joker from Batman, I do understand that Sonic-like desire to gotta go fast, to feel the press of momentum and forget the rules, forget the fear. Which, again, is what joining a no rules server in Wreckfest is for (or maybe Night-Runners, a game that channels the illegal night time racing of Japan). After years of enjoying racing games naively, as a muttering pedestrian having some mild fun, I now understand them a little better.

Wreckfest and its crashy arcade racer ilk – they’re a place where the stress of overwhelming safety precautions, the risk of hurt or death, can be completely forgotten in favour of smokily drifting around a corner like a scrambling cat skidding on kitchen floor tiles. A smashily safe simulation where you can witness a terrible pile-up and think not “my god” but “lol cya suckersss” as you drive past. Yes, I am late to the party. I am late to driving and late to Wreckfest and probably late to any appointment I make because I still drive cautiously on country roads and frustrate the jackass hovering three inches behind me. But arriving late and safe is better than fast and not at all.