The Details Racing Games Want You To Ignore 

This was a fun one for me and was my first time trying a totally improvised video essay. It didn’t go exactly as planned and required some reshoots but I still think it’s a great topic and a great video. What are your thoughts?

My older sister always ignored the races when we played the need for speed games as kids so she could go 'house shopping' and pick out where she would live in that world. It used to drive me crazy but when I got a bit older I found myself doing the same thing and making up my own little stories and characters when I got tired of racing

This reminds me of one small part of the book Fahrenheit 451. In that dystopian future, they describe that billboards have had to be stretched out to a very high degree. The reason being, the cars have gotten too fast to read the original billboards. With racing games, it's the opposite of this. Instead of making things longer so you can purposefully focus on them while driving, they use the fact that you won't look at the details so that they can make less environments.

Austin is such a king of slowing down, I'm surprised he even owns a racing game

Just wanted to leave a comment to appreciate this kind of content your channel is a goldmine for random video game shit like this that no one else focuses on I love it

The billboards in Remastered replace actual for-sale ad space in the original release, up to and including ads for the Obama campaign. Burger King, the clothing brand Diesel, XM radio shows, and car brands, all bought space.

when i was a kid playing need for speed with my brother, my fav thing to do in the game (outside of spectacularly crashing my car) was to leave the road and drive in a the countryside until i found a nice enough spot where i would just stop and just…. soak the atmosphere in. i spend way too long looking at random shit in this game lmao

10:10 That machine is called a pallet jack. It's basically a hand-pushed, hand-pumped equivalent to a forklift, used to move large amounts of goods that have been stacked onto shipping pallets. I use one at work to move bulk samples about. It's absolutely the sort of equipment I would expect to see in that sort of situation (in my job, a lot of people spend break times very close to the loading dock due to the easy access to fresh air).

Some of my favorite gaming memories is being a kid and exploring the map of need for speed underground with my cousin. It accomplished nothing, but we just wanted to explore and see the world. You do a great job at capturing the emotion of those feelings and that drive, that is unique to video games? Not exactly the same, but i remember reading a story about a guy who had his grandpa play LA noire because it was it was a time capsule for him. He drove sround and pointed out places to his grandson.

As someone who has worked on a QA team for a racing game, I have spent a lot of time looking at this kind of stuff. This really captures the heavily curated falseness that is very particular to racing game environments.

I’m sitting here watching an Any Austin video. If he had his way I would ignore the hair clips in his hair. How crazy is that?

I feel like the Tony Hawk games are ripe for this kind of analysis. Can't tell you how much time I spent in American Wasteland and Underground 1/2 just wandering around and looking at stuff. One of my favorite pastimes was going into the park editor and just building towns, always designating one spot as "my house." Even figured out a way to clip inside of the place-able shack so I could just sit in there and hang out.

The hair clips really elevate the look 👌

i love the sort of raw literalist outlook you like to have in video games, like "what if this place were reality? does this snack machine make sense? does this hallway make sense?"

You should do a video on games that really hone in on unreasonably realistic aspects of worlds in video games. The powerlines spurred an idea - how many games showed you exactly how things worked, but we were too busy playing to look at? Great vid, okay hair clips

My sister and I used to roleplay random storylines in burnout and completely ignore the races. We would drive around to where we weren't supposed to go and listen to the soundtrack that had the music she liked at the time. This brought me back to a memory I didn't even remember I had, and that's one of the best things from your channel.

Burnout Paradise had one of the most surreal, uncanny moments in gaming: On PS3 they integrated your PS Home avatar onto the in game billboards (if you had one). It somehow both added and removed immersion at the same time. I can't even find search results that prove they did this so it could just be a mandela hallucination.

It's kind of crazy seeing someone else interested in this incredibly hyper-specific topic. As a kid, I would _always_ do this with racing games. I loved completely ignoring the races and just driving around seeing the environments. Some of the racing games I remember exploring this way were Mario Kart Double Dash, Flatout 2, Lego Drome Racers, GT Legends, Test Drive Off Road 3, Hot Wheels Stunt Track Challenge, and a weird little game called Chicken Hunter: License to Grill (which I doubt anyone else even knows about). As a kid I had a fascination with out-of-bounds areas in games, or the little background details that were never meant to be looked at closely. I guess they gave me a weird dream-like feeling, which today would be called liminality, but at the time I didn't even know what that word meant. Details like that still fascinate me today, but it's kind of hard nowadays to find games with un-polished areas, let alone the ability to go out-of-bounds to see them without 3rd party engines. This was so much more common in early 2000's games which only makes their nostalgic oddness more potent to me today.

Oh this is going to be a million sub channel in no time

This kind of thing has been on my mind, lately, playing Splatoon 3. There's a huge amount of detail on the multiplayer stages that you really don't have time to appreciate during matches. A ton of attention seems to have been put into the design, to allow players to quickly interpret the environment as a bunch of surfaces relevant to painting and traversing them. When I use Recon Mode to just hang out and explore a stage, though, I notice details, decorations, or realize what some part of the level geometry is actually meant to be, that I've been rushing past so many times. Putting that much extra detail that many people won't notice during play seems like a cumbersome, and possibly very counterintuitive thing to prioritize along side of making sure the visual language is so mechanically clear, but it's really impressive how well it works in that game. There's also examples of the lower detail areas you're meant to ignore, but in Splatoon those are usually locations you can't actually reach. In-bounds areas seem to be consistently filled with little artistic embellishments.

When you mentioned GTA IV, it made me think about how GTA San Andreas does it. In some places, they really go above and beyond to make things be right, but then other times it looks like they just didn't bother at all. Kind of makes it even more fun to explore, because now it can be rewarding in two different ways.

The guy on break is standing next to a loading jack

great video. I like the little bit about beautiful sunsets as seen from parking lots, the thing I take away from those pictures is just that's where people happen to be when the beauty of the world around them simply happens, since they aren't seeking it out. There's something surreal about the mundanity of our suburban structures being subjected to the majesty of the natural sky every once in a while.

i think i remember recommending "odd and unusual places in midnight club 2"...i'm glad racing games got a video :)

Wtf am I doing

With all the respect in the world, understanding what you meant and also sharing the idea: I laughed a LOT with the phrase "books have terrible graphics". +10

10:10 That's a pallet jack. It makes it easy to lift and move heavy pallets. The prongs go in the bottom of the pallet, and it uses hydraulics to lift it up off the ground, above wheel level.

As a child, my friend and I would play in the Mario Kart Wii racetracks. We wouldn't race and we'd turn off CPUs. We would actually roleplay little stories for characters that worked at Coconut Mall for example. We noticed all these little details and it was always exciting to explore the maps in a new manner

The first game that evoked this feeling for me was Motorcross Madness 2. Despite not actually having a free roam mode, there were no barriers on the race tracks so there was nothing stopping you from exploring the map. For some reason, they included a button that let you cycle the camera between all the AI vehicles. You could forget you're even playing a racing game and just watch the strange facsimile of rural living from the perspective of a bus, a train, a biplane. (Of course, everyone knows this game from the way it launches you back into the map when you go out of bounds, lmao)

reading the unintelligible newspaper stand made me laugh

Burnout Paradise is probably my favourite game, played it on XBox and now on Switch. I like how the objective of finding all of the yellow gates and billboards forces you to look at the surroundings more, especially when you get to the end and only have a few to hunt for.

I swear to god learning how oversteer works in video games saved my life. Long story short, i was driving my friend's V8 truck on a rainy highway and i started to hydroplane when i accelerated 😅 I managed to correct it, while going at 65 MPH!!! Luckily there were no cars on the left or right of me. I maintain that, because i learned the ins and out of how car physics works through video games (namely, Driver Sanfransisco which i had just played 2 months prior), me and my friend didn't die that day.

I was playing Tears of the Kingdom today. I went toward a shrine from an angle you were surely never meant to do it from. Basically, I scaled a mountain on the shoreline from the shore side and trecked along the remarkably empty mountainside to the shrine. And, as I did this, I thought of Any Austin remarking on the fact that this was a superliminal location that only existed because other locations existed.

you always get me thinking about these video game spaces a little differently :) plus you’re a very witty writer-“books have terrible graphics” and “these games are meant to be viewed at 80mph” are very snappy and imaginative and effective things to say

Idk about GTA4 but in Red dead redemption 2 I saw a video this guy followed the power lines from the Saint Denis across to all the settlements with power. Ones without power lines only use oil lamps for lighting

I absolutely love this concept of slowing down and spending time in unintended places in video games. I used to do it constantly in Zelda Twilight Princess as a kid, but yeah, as an adult I never let myself stray from the video game objectives! Awesome video.

Your channel throws me back to OG 2000s RU-vid in the best possible way. Love the nostalgia and musings, love your humor and thoughtfulness, keep doing whatever doinks your dink. I'm here for it!

Everything about your speaking/presentation style and how you analyze overlooked details in games is incredibly comforting and appealing ☺️ Immaculate vibes

Spot on. The interesting thing is that this approach goes for how it sounds as well. I worked on Forza Motorsport (2023) as a sound designer, on a bunch of things but most relevantly on the tracks Le Mans and Suzuka. It wasn’t open world but the same principle applied: I put in ridiculous effort to try and make it sound like those places in real life, have plausible birds and bugs for what looked like the season, and to make the environment reflections sound realistic at any speed. Nobody ever noticed, because it all sounded pretty much identical at 200 mph, and the wind+engine were obviously much louder than any owl hoot system or Japanese Cicadas. Sometimes tech is indeed the limitation (rendering tens of thousands of fully rigged and animated crowd members with individual voices and cheers and locations is still basically impossible, even if you make everything else look/sound like butt). But it’s certainly an order of magnitude less constraining than it used to be, and when you pump the brakes to look around, it still ends up in a similar place.

Need For Speed Underground 2 has an arch made in memoriam to one of the devs who died

Really cool premise for a video. Well done man!

ok laughed too hard when you called a pallet jack a machine

Great topic! The part about grocery store parking lots having great skies is funny to me bc i worked at a grocery store for a summer and I fucking hated that I’d be stuck inside bagging or pushing carts or whatever while this beautiful sunset was there watching me. It felt mean, like take me with you !!!

Thank you for another phenomenal presentation. I think indefatigably would make a GREAT T-shirt design. P.S. that machine is called a pallet jack. ♡

6:21 I like how you can see tire tracks as if he's had to redo his parking several times lol

Funnily, Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2 is the game that made me discover the art of just slowing down, turning off engine sounds/music and exploring the scenery. That game has a lot of unremarkable and interesting places. But what I liked were the spots that emit sounds you usually only hear in passing. One spot in the mediterranean tracks was just an italian mum arguing with about 5 kids over and over

When me and my brother were little and playing trackmania (old version on a CD) we discovered we could drive off the course and into the water. In every course there was a background scenery of a few islands/hills and we would travel to one of them, which we called volcano island. It took around 20 minutes of pressing the forward key to drive the way to the island through the water. And when we arrived we would drive around the island for a couple minutes, trying to climb the mountain, before the car ultimately tumbled, landed on it's back or side, and we had to click back to the last checkpoint on the course. 20 minutes from the island. It was always worth it for some reason.

Idk how many hours I spent as a bored kid just staring at this exact kinda stuff. Love this channel so hard

Hey Austin, you prolly wont read or even see this, but I just wanted to let you know that I am currently watching every single video of yours (starting from the oldest) while im on a long trip through South Africa. Please never change and always do what you enjoy doing! (currently at the COD:Ghosts Eggbusters EX episode) I hope its okay btw if I download a couple episodes as I dont always will have internet but I make sure to load the video first so in case of an AD pops up you still get the money for it!

these little areas is what really captivated me in games when i was a kid. i would just run around on empty counterstrike maps, try to get out of map bounds and just find cool places you're not meant to be. my playstyle is a little different now, but im glad you reminded me to look for it again.

I’m reminded of Tom Scott’s video a while back about driving his favourite video game in real life after he realized that the Need for Speed demo track is based on Vancouver He mentioned wishing he could get out of the car and ride the train or look out at the totem poles, something he’s now been able to do I remember feeling really similarly about racing games as a kid; that video and this one really speak to me

Kudos for doubling down on the Indifatiguably.

Austin you consistently have a way with humanising video games. Especially what you said at the end here, to just go back once you are done, and reclaim the joy of just wonder at what's going on in the game you are playing. It brought me back to my childhood playing fucken Cars Maternational of all things. I'd spend hours just driving into walls, trying to explore and see what random shit was in the shop signs, or to see if the main street was 1-1 for what was in the movie which I'd seen ad nauseum. You are an absolute legend when it comes to humanising Austin, Absolut Legend.

This video justifies why I have a premium RU-vid subscription, great work

The funny thing about taking in the scenery in Burnout Paradise is that Criterion was founded by engineers at camera manufacturer Canon's British R&D department as part of their research into CGI.

I will always love the Crew 1 and the details in the environment I constantly would stop to snap pictures in interiors clipping through building with the camera so many little details and cool areas.

Holy shit you blew up. I haven't checked out your channel for a while, but I like seeing what you're up to now and then. We spoke on Patreon sometime 2016, I'm glad you're still around.

Austin’s finger wave curls have been COOKING I can’t wait to see the results they’re going to be amazing

Love the concept and the more freeform approach. You're engaging, funny and bright. Always enjoy your work. Cheers.

"Whatever that machine is IDK" bro never worked retail 💀

this and your last vid have been real bangers. such a specific feeling that you appreciate the way it should lol. have you considered looking at incidental birds in various games?

I watched the recent eclipse in a grocery store parking lot in the path of totality. That unremarkable and odd space was glorious.

I really appreciate that you share a sense of analysis for the logistical facts of these worlds with me. I often find myself playing games and examining my surroundings and wondering just how much or how little thought has been put into the hows and whys of the world I'm inhabiting as I play. I look at the buildings and wonder how goods and services are exchanged and carried out from that building. How feasible is it for any given object to actually enter that building and how is it transported to a given room? is there equipment present that makes such things possible? stuff like that. You add another layer of perspective to my curiosity and that means a lot to me. Thanks man. Keep going. I love your stuff and the way you seem to think.

Great video! This kind of reminds me of whenever Ross of Accursed Farms reviews driving games in his Ross's Game Dungeon Series! He also talks about the weird aproximations of our worlds that racing games create. I especially like his Test Drive 3 and Trackmania video

I love looking at all the little details on Mario Kart tracks. Why are the Toad bystanders three times as large as Donkey Kong?

You are the youtuber with the most clips in their hair! No. 1 youtuber, no other tuber has as many clips in their hair as Austin!! The tuber with the most hair clips per quantifiable unit of content!

seeing all those hair clips I was half expecting to see you put on more and more as the video went on, like the Scary Movie hat

love your weird holistic approach to completely unimportant sections of games. as a game dev the industry is trying (at the expense of the devs including me...) to move towards the rockstar model where there's detail everywhere all the time that isn't necessary, it's neat occasionally but in honesty it doesn't really make the game better, and these weird pseudospaces you talk about in your videos have their own charm, it's wonderful that you don't just point them out but seem to genuinely enjoy them. thank you for celebrating the unloved parts of games, they are the parts that let us make the loved parts.

10:11 That is a pallet jack! It's like a small hand forklift.

need that powerline type video fr

Love it. I LOVE your odd and unremarkable places videos and this was no exception while making great points! I hope you keep both types of content coming.

Loved this style of video! Also, saw Sonic Adventure pulled up on your menu screen and are now putting in an official request for a Station Square employment survey

I remember playing racing games (both "realistic" like GTA and cartoony like Mario Kart or Diddy Kong Racing) and it got to the point where we'd just drive around obeying the law. it was a nice change from just running NPCs over and causing damage and trying to find new shortcuts. I highly recommend just driving with traffic in any racing game you have and just taking in the sights.

Coming to finish this video after my constant loop of the drowning videos to get me thru being sick has made me SO happy because I finally got the name for your song! I finally got to listen to it and BOY what a treat the full song is. 💕 I love this side of yt

"Books have terrible graphics" - Any Austin, 2024 I love your videos and your writing style

Dude getting that JOJO pin in hair drip

Da fuq on yo head bro

Gerard Butler starred in a movie called Gamer. It was a surreal idea of a world that has always stuck with me because someone on production put a lot of effort into the world building for a rather mediocre forgettable film. In it, the crowd of the action sequences that the convicts kill each other in are criminals who basically pay off lesser crimes by being npcs for the death games. There is an entire throw away scene detailing this. The crowds in racing games always make me think of this. Just people trapped in an existential horror of being an npc glued to an animation sequence for the main protagonist

One of my favorite spots in a racing game is the beach near the lighthouse in Forza Horizon 4, I went there on a whim for a decent screenshot of my car and now whenever I play the game I feel compelled to just kinda sit there and listen to the ocean, sometimes even go onto the dock and just park, it’s some of the most peaceful moments I’ve felt in any game

i always hate when videos have titles like "this is what they wanted you to FORGET..." but ill make an exception for you austin bc like. the title of this video is true. the backgrounds of racing games are MEANT to be ignored, this aint clickbait, its just A Fact

So sick of Austin doing these clickbait trends with no substance like philosophizing about liminal spaces in Burnout from 2008

Keep this energy going forward, Austin. Never speed up. Stay slow, friend.

The Crew 1 and 2 are great for this sort of thing. They try to recreate US cities but the cracks show very quickly. Especially if it's a city you've been to or live in. It's fascinating.

horrid video about nothing that nobody cares about

Fantastic video. I love the green screen stuff! I was mildly distracted by your shirt sometimes changing. But I liked it. I wish it were a longer video! You can be so mentally engaging, taking my mind off the troubles of reality to focus on pieces of video games that make us more contemplative

I really love this take on racing games and your style of discussion. I wish you all the success in your channel Austin!

I can't wait for Austin's next video series, following all the power lines in video games to their natural endpoint

i love this video. i play mario kart by sticking bowser in some kind of middle-aged man holiday vehicle, often a hefty motorcycle but sometimes a sleek convertible, and driving slowly through tracks in solo time trials. the environments get so much more enjoyable for me when i take them at a sedate pace.

I love this video, the style and delivery just makes it so much fun. I’ve done the same thing where I just focus on unexpected details and it’s so weirdly satisfying. However, this is the first time I’ve heard it actually explained in a way where I finally understand why even I do it. Look forward to seeing even more!

I enjoy this so much! Amazing content, best wishes to you and your future projects! 🌻

i loved stopping and looking around in NFSU and NFSU2. specially in NFSU tho, because it didn't have free roam. as a kid, i would enter a race and try my best to go off bounds and see what's around the corner. today i know there's nothing there but i really had that fixation of seeing what was not meant to be seen, and the back alleys and common places in that game still evoke such nostalgia to me. not a game but related to that, i remember doing that in movies as well. i specifically remember doing that in one of the jurassic park movies, in a scene where someone was getting devoured by little dinosaurs and the camera panned away. i would stand as close as i could to the edge of the tv to try and look at what the movie didn't want to show me lol. really hadn't thought about that in a long time. very cool video.

That thingy in GTA4 is a pallet jack, just meant to be a handheld forklift without needing classes to use

The only proper open-world racing game I played in the 2000's was NFS Most Wanted. It has some cool locations like a few sport stadiums, parking lots, a golf course and a college campus for example. The map also has a lot of hiding spots and shortcuts for the police chases and races, but as you said, you're really not supposed to stop around and have a look in the middle of a high speed chase. Now I kinda wanna play the game again and have a closer look at everything the environment has.

San Francisco Rush and San Francisco Rush 2049 are among my all time favorite racing games and they were on the N64. It's more than racing, though. You actually unlock some things by exploring the tracks Midway has created and finding keys and coins. Both games even reward you with cool secret areas that you would never see if all you did was stay on the obvious paths and shortcuts and race (meaning you really have to go out of your way to see and collect everything). That also reminds me of the time I made a track in ModNation Racers that wasn't really meant to be raced on, but for a chillout spot (It was a simple loop with an exit leading to the rest of the terrain). I added some secrets and even had a small challenge to "collect" the sheep. I miss that game.

Yes, please! Do anything on practical city infrastructure in games.

The game does actually expect you to park. There's actually a scoring system for parking your car in burnout paradise, its just not for the lots, only for parking in the street; you should try it out.

Back with another banger.... truly my favourite creator on RU-vid. Would love to see this explored further! I remember my sister and I would play Ford vs Chevy for the xBox and just drive around like law-abiding citizens. We especially liked one level that had a barn you could actually drive up to!

I really like this vid! The improv, the editing, the theme. Its all a wonderful blend!

I really like this kind of video. Of course, I like the other kinds where you do employment surveys of game counts or something like that. But video essays like this are also pretty cool. Looking forward to seeing more if that's what the plan is

love your vids so much, really makes me appreciate the small details i usually ignore in video games.