Rally Cross

Publisher	SCEA
Developer	SISA
Product Code	SCUS-94308
Release Date	February 1997
Genre	Racing

Description

6 courses – Race each course forward or backwards. Elements like snow, ice, sand, streams, mud, jumps, dirt, and gravel test your driving skills.

20 Rally Vehicles – Cars and trucks with 4 wheel independent suspension – each with different traction, speed, handling and acceleration.

Rally Style Racing – Power slides, end-over-end crashes, roll your car, crash into other cars, force cars off the road – all collisions damage your vehicle.

Race With 4 Players – Quad split screen racing allows up to four players to race at once!

Intense Gaming – Race through a season or compete in a tournament – 3 difficulty levels, four perspectives and CD quality sound deliver the ultimate racing game.

Game Cheats

Win All Seasons – Enter the following name at the high score screen – weeoo
Win Rookie Season – Enter the following name at the high score screen – vet_me
Win Veteran Season – Enter the following name at the high score screen – in_a_pro

POST MOTEM

What went right:

changing from a golf game to a 3d stunt racing game – I was hired to work on Rally Cross in March 1996, but the decision to ditch the golf game was made in fall 1995, I believe. Without this change, Rally Cross wouldn’t exist.
changing from a 3d stunt racing game to an off-road racing game – I was hired to do the physics and can say there is no way we would have been able to ship a 3d stunt racing game in any reasonable amount of time. It wasn’t until Twisted Metal 3 that I even figured out how to do some decent 3d collision detection using the physics that I implemented, whereas Rally Cross and CART World Series used a 2d height-map for its collision detection. The 2d height-map would not have allowed for 3d stunts like loops, etc.
bouncy physics – It’s just what I happened to implement since it was based on a technique I saw in a SGI workstation demo when I was in college, but this bouncy physics are unique to Rally Cross. I’ve not since seen that used in a racing game, and it’s what gives Rally Cross it’s own flavor, and to this day, it’s considered a cult classic racing game.

What went wrong:

So, one day, a tester found what he thought was an on-purpose Easter egg in the Lakes level inside one of the arches in the town – some initials on one of the textures, someplace that the typical person would not be looking since they would be busy racing. The initials were secretly replaced with an odd texture to camouflage it. It was down to the wire with getting a final burn ready, so the decision had to be made to use the version of Lakes with the initials or the version with the odd texture.. so Rally shipped with the version with the odd texture.