Retrospective: Turbo Esprit

Every now and then I'd catch glimpses of the objectives I was supposed to be tackling, occasional spurts of colour in a two-tone world. But it never seemed as much fun as the anarchic fannying about I was already enjoying, so they remained mysterious.

The aim of the game, in actual fact, was to roam the streets looking for a gang of drug dealers. Text updates from HQ were meant to direct you to a specific map reference where the nefarious peddlers could be found.

Some five years before Tarantino, the crims even had their own colour coding. The car carrying the initial supply was red, the delivery cars were blue and roving hitmen patrolled the city in bright pink cars, clearly the game's equivalent of Steve Buscemi.

They had a fairly sophisticated network going on. Your targets weren't simply pootling around at random, but following specific routines that you had to decipher and disrupt in order to succeed.

Supplies would arrive at their intended destination, then delivery cars would set out to make the drop. Once they'd done their dirty deeds they were gone - and you'd failed. Even then, the game let you carry on, killing time (and pedestrians) until more drugs arrived.

It's a surprisingly stiff challenge. In fact, firing Turbo Esprit up today, it's clear that playing the game properly is often borderline impossible. Narrow streets and randomly spawning vehicles on the other side of the road making overtaking a deadly gamble.

As such, reaching the drug cars on the map before they vanish relies is as much a matter of luck as judgment.

It's also easy to get lodged on corners if you take them too early, forcing a complete restart. And as civilian cars can box you in and never move you have to destroy them, racking up penalty points if not guilt.

What I love most about Turbo Esprit is that I was blissfully unaware of all this intrigue and inconvenience at the time. I played it endlessly. Even though I had the original cassette in its robust Durell clamshell case, complete with instructions, I somehow neglected to understand the core premise of the game for my entire childhood.

To me, Turbo Esprit was simply the "drive really fast around a city" game. At that, it excelled.

Even better, to my 10-year-old sister, it was "Picking My Daughter Up", a game that gave her the chance to live out the giddy dream of being a suburban mum on the school run.

OK, so pink cars would occasionally turn up and try to shoot her, but this never seemed to bother her. I still wonder how my sister rationalised these sporadic drive-bys into her domestic fantasy. Maybe that's just what happens in Romford.

That she was able to co-opt a violent fast-paced crime game and turn it into something that appealed to her less visceral tastes is rather brilliant, though, and a fact that still amuses me to this day.

Ultimately, and much as with other pioneering 8-bit Britsoft classics, whether or not we knew what we were doing didn't really matter. Either by accident or design, Turbo Esprit hit on one of the key principles of video gaming. Namely, that telling the player how to play becomes a lot less important when the game is simply fun to play with.

It was easier in the eighties, of course, when we were just grateful for the ability to move blocky shapes around on the telly. But you can still see that ethos, lurking close to the surface of today's most popular open-world games.

Give us something to do and we're happy. Give us the space to do something of our own and we fall in love. And I still love Turbo Esprit.