30 Racing Game Masterpieces You Need to Play - IGN30 From the heavyweights of horsepower to the sultans of simulation. As IGN celebrates its 30th anniversary, it’s my job to assemble a list of 30 racing games that can lay claim to being bona fide masterpieces. It’s honestly a tricky sort of thing to curate. Racing games (and automotive cultures worldwide) are just too tribal for any one batch of racing games to be universally accepted as objectively the best of the best. When you’re dealing with a limited shortlist, you simply can’t inject someone’s favourite racing game without trimming a favourite of somebody else; any one entry will always come at the expense of another deserving candidate. The fact that the genre dates back over 50 years, all the way to the earliest origins of video games, only makes it more difficult. That is, for as long as we’ve had video games, we’ve had racing games. And we’ve had a lot of really, really good ones. In past racing retrospectives we’ve looked at things like overwhelming influence above all else – the racing games that literally wrote the rules of the road for others to follow. On other occasions we’ve restricted our round-ups to just a single game per series in an attempt to recognise a wider spectrum of greatness. But the nature of a true masterpiece got me thinking about this in a slightly different way. In this instance, we’re not just talking about great racing games. We’re talking about the premier racing games that define entire developers to this day. We’re talking about the greatest works of the world’s most respected racing studios, from Papyrus Design Group to Polyphony Digital. With that foundation in mind, here are IGN’s racing game masterpieces – 30 esteemed and extraordinary racing