The most important day of your life is not the day you bought your first home, or the day you got your dream job, neither is it the day you married your spouse, nor is it the day your child was born. The most important day of your life is the day you get your driver’s licence. That’s when life suddenly makes a whole lot more sense. Your licence is literally your ticket to freedom. 

Before getting my driver’s licence, a time the catholic church referred to as BDL (Before Driver’s Licence), my desire to interact with cars had to be met with video games. 

If I remember correctly, it all started with Starsky and Hutch, on PC, which I think I got from a Nestlé cereal box back when they still gave you gifts in those. The point of the game, for those of you who don’t know Starsky and Hutch, was to chase after criminals in their awesome-looking red and white Ford Gran Torino. I was too young to understand how to play the game correctly- it took me a long time to understand the controls to get Hutch to shoot his gun out the window – but that didn’t matter to me, all I wanted to do was drive the car like in the movie: through bay-widows of corner stores, over roundabouts and even jumping through the second story of an office building! It was a blast.

I played Starsky and Hutch on the family computer, back when there was only one PC for the whole family to share.
It wasn’t long before we got the PlayStation 2, which revolutionised my gaming experience and, as a car enthusiast, changed my whole world. The PS2 was a gift to my older half-brother, I think. It doesn’t matter much; what matters is that I didn’t choose what games we’d have. We just had games and I could only hope to like them. Lucky for me, we had one car game, it was called Paris-Marseille Racing II. Objectively speaking, it wasn’t a good game. But that’s all I had at the time and I was thrilled to play it.
Here’s a little personal note for you: My wife hates that I have a soft spot for the Peugeot 205cc. She claims it’s a waste of raw material, but I disagree. I quite like it and it’s because of that game. The 205cc was my favourite car to race.

When my parents realised they wouldn’t be able to drag me out of the house anymore because I could now “drive” cars, their only option was to enable me to do so. Which they did. Because shortly after the movie Cars came out, my favourite movie at the time, Cars The Video Game was released. What a day. My life was complete.
All jokes aside, this game taught me the basics of driving fast; The racing line and slip-streeming were two racing “techniques” Doc Hudson instructed Flash MacQueen, and me, to do. 

For your sake, I’m going to skip a few years here and go directly to the present day, also known as ADL (After Driver’s Licence). But I still need to mention a racing simulator called Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, on PS3. The PS3’s graphics were so much better than the PS2’s; It was the first time I could look at and manipulate cars that I could otherwise only see in magazines or on TopGear. So big thanks to Zian’s father for letting me spend so much time at your house to play that game.  

I don’t play on my PlayStation as often as I did before. Partially because I have a driver’s licence now so I can drive legally when I want to, and partially because I’m an adult with a job, so I’d rather spend my free time doing something with my wife and my dog rather than sitting on a couch staring at a TV.
Once in a while, though, I have an itch to scratch; When the racer in me wants to burn rubber and drift around roundabouts, well… real life won’t do. That’s when I turn the PS4 on and load one of the two following games: Need For Speed 2015 or Grand Theft Auto V.

Need For Speed is when I want video game-like physics with a sprinkle of realistic experience. That balance of gameplay forces me to focus on my trajectory into a corner, my line and my braking zone, because those aspects of the game are very broadly respected, but because it is not a simulator like Gran Turismo is, it lets you make mistakes and catch them without respecting any laws of physics. Ultimately, with the right settings, the correct modifications on the car and a bit of discipline from me to drive properly, Need For Speed can give thrilling driving sensations from the comfort of my couch that would otherwise get me directly to jail in real life.

As for GTA V, well, I cannot exactly say how many hours a day I spent playing it. It was too long ago and I was too young to care about that sort of thing, but with hindsight, I know it was what we now consider too much. I couldn’t have been much older than fifteen when I first started playing and I already felt like I didn’t have enough time in my day to do that; I had to go to school for eight hours a day, take the train to get there which was a couple more hours, and my mother insisted we had dinner together as ‘a united family’. That’s at least eleven hours of my days taken up with what, at that age, I could only consider as responsibilities. I had about thirteen hours left of free time and, if sleep wasn’t necessary for one’s survival, I would have spent all thirteen of them in front of the TV racing cars in GTA V online.
At its core, GTA V isn’t a car game; Wikipedia qualifies it as an action-adventure game, but that’s like saying Queen Elizabeth II is just a member of the royal family, or that a RedBull’s RB20 Formula 1 car is just a car.
GTA V is what happens when a bunch of dudes decide to make a video game in which they can do everything they have ever thought about doing in real life but didn’t due to moral, legal, psychological, and financial reasons. And one of the many things you can do in this game – when you’re not robbing banks to pay off mobsters or crooked government agencies – is modify cars and race them. 

The physics of GTA V are not realistic at all, but they are intuitive yet they also take time to master. What I mean is that to achieve a perfect lap time, one must not hit the walls, crash into lamp posts, run over pedestrians, or smash into other cars because all of that slows you down; a perfect lap time can only be achieved if the player has reached such a profound understanding of the games physics that he doesn’t hit the wall in a corner because he knows how fast he could hit the apex, he doesn’t hit lamp posts because he’s in control of his car, avoids the incoming traffic at the last second and only kills a couple pedestrians because this is GTA V and if running them over gets you a better lap time than so be it.

I was trying to achieve this perfection. It was day in day out commitment to the craft. I loved it. The added complexity of avoiding incoming traffic and people on the sidewalks was something the Need For Speed franchise didn’t do, which was a shame because it was thrilling. Also, when the cops were chasing me in Need For Speed, I couldn’t get out of my car, blow them up with a rocket launcher, then take down the helicopter with a sniper rifle like I can in GTA. 

Additionally, when I didn’t want to stress out about lap times or the police, I could just grab one of the many cars at my disposal and go from a drive around a very big and diverse map. GTA V fulfiled my wildest car-guy needs. 

Video games are usually looked down upon. Rather, the excessive use of them is. Sure, I just told you I spent too much time playing when I was young, and in one of the games I could run over people, rob banks and speed away from the police – I can see why there’s a slight pushback. But I didn’t become a serial bank robber, nor did I become a convicted street-racer due to my gaming habits. Because that’s not what playing video games do, no matter how many hours one plays.
Besides spending too much time in front of a TV, not getting enough sleep or vitamin-D, and becoming slightly antisocial, video games are great. Especially for kids like me who have a passion that, at that time, I couldn’t actually experience. I could look for cool cars in town, read magazines, watch TopGear or YouTube videos but even with all that I still wasn’t experiencing anything. But with video games I could fake reality and play pretend, like a little boy who dresses up as a policeman and arrests you for the crime of being an adult. That little boy knows he isn’t a real policeman, the same way I knew video games weren’t the real deal, but it was as close as I could get to it.

So, for those moments of bliss where video games become a surrogate for a passion one couldn’t experience in any other way, like leading me to think I was a great racer despite the fact my butt had never been in a driver’s seat, we should look up on videos games. Give a PlayStation to every kid over the age of ten so that they can figure out what their passion is. Or, if they already have one, they can do like me and find moral comfort by virtually interacting with what they are passionate about.
Ultimately, if it wasn’t for video games, the only way my parents could have gotten me smile would have been to let me drive their car. But that was illegal. Therefore, if you have a young car guy at home who looks at cars driving by your house with a sad grin on his face, get him a video game about racing. That will do just fine until he’s old enough to get his driver’s licence.

Max,

Dear reader, if you have made it this far, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments what passion-related video game you played when you were younger.