Quad Challenge

Summary

The game was released with little commercial fanfare and it never made major sales figures in the retail stores.

During championship runs, the player can run free runs for as long as he likes before racing the fictional computer opponents or the other human opponent in a timed race. Actual recorded human speech is used to count down the racers before the start of the race. The player has two chances to win before receiving a game over. Just like in Pole Position, there is a lap timer as well as a game timer. Finishing each lap extends the game timer like in most arcade-style racing games. All the courses in the game are minor bumps and simple turns and the drivers appear to have been copied from the NES video game Excitebike; right down to their wipeout animation. Having the engine overheat while racing too fast was a realistic measure considering that racing games during the early 1990s consisted of primarily using the accelerator on straightaways and using the brakes on the more trickier turns like those found on Formula One race tracks.

Allowing the game timer to reach zero (0) in a one-player game will force the player to retire from the race. In a two-player game, things are different. If a single player allows the timer to reach zero, then the other player can continue racing as long as his timer doesn't reach zero as well. If the timers of both players reach zero before finishing the racing, then the game is considered to be a draw and both players lose.

Legacy

This game was considered to be one of the first off-road racing games for a console system. It was released more than 10 years before ATV Offroad Fury for the PlayStation 2 brought the genre into the 21st century. However, it has become a niche genre again since THQ discontinued their MX vs. ATV series. Even prior to the cancellation of the MX vs. ATV series, driving an ATV around closed-circuit tracks never appealed much to the mainstream audience of gamers.