Cars have had some sort of role in videogames since the earliest days of the medium. Actually, even before, if you count electro-mechanical driving games like 1941’s Drive-Mobile. Cars and video games just go together, since cars are fun things to control, and video games allow people to control fun things, in safe ways without real-world repercussions. I mention all of this because it just makes the plight of the poor Lexus LS400 in the bonus stage of the 1991 Capcom game, Street Fighter II, all the more galling.
Street Fighter II, as you may have been able to infer by its evocative name, is a fighting game. All of the stages involve one or two players controlling some very colorful and pneumatically-buff fighters kicking the crap out of each other. Well, except for one bonus stage, where you get to pick one of several buff fighters with weirdly bold personal style choices to kick the crap out out of a car.
Not a sentient car that fights back or anything, just a car. You just kick the crap out of a normal car.
Not just a normal car, but a specific normal car, even a desirable car at the time, a Toyota Celcior, which we got here in America as the Lexus LS400. These were cars with some dignity, as you can tell by their advertising:
…and, of course, there’s this famous Lexus ad, all about classy refinement and refined classiment:
This was the car that pixellated meatheads would beat into rubble for bonus points in the game.
Look, here’s a whole video (of the Super Nintendo console version) of every fighter option available to smash the everloving clamnuts out of this helpless luxury sedan, including, with some irony, a sumo named Honda:
I’ve been looking for some sort of reason or significance why this particular car was chosen, but so far I’ve yet to find anything conclusive, beyond the fact that this was a then-new and popular luxury car of the era.
There is a little bit of backstory from the game, which explains the presence of the car thusly:
In the storyline, a man takes cars that do not sell and offers prize money for those who manage to break a car within a time limit with their bare hands for $10 per try. The idea unexpectedly became a big hit, with many people going to the harbor to give it a try.
I don’t know, I feel like if that car salesman can’t unload a new Lexus in 1991, they’re just pretty crap at their job. You’d have to sell a lot of smashing sessions at $10 a pop to get anywhere close to the roughly $35,000 that car would have cost back then.
Once the car is well-smashed, I have to give credit to the graphic designers that put in some pixellated fountains of coolant (blue) and gasoline (yellow) at roughly the locations they would be leaking from on the carcass:
Also, it looks like the horns are featured there! That’s some pretty good detail!
If you’ve always felt the Lexus LS400 was done rather dirty by Street Fighter II, you may be pleased to know that, in Japan at least, Toyota got a bit of revenge, not with a Celcior or LS400 exactly, but with a Toyota C-HR, in this commercial:
That’ll teach you punks to beat up perfectly innocent and reliable Japanese luxury cars parked on docks.
Oh, and I suppose the Lexus LS400 eventually got even more videogame-related revenge, as it was featured as the boss enemy in a another 1991 videogame called Turbo Force:
Man, 1990s Japanese videogame developers sure had complicated relationships with Lexus LS400s.
I laughed so hard when I read this headline.
I wish that Pontiac had taken the stacked wineglasses and put them on the hood of a Trans Am, started the engine, had the stack collapse and all shatter, and ended it with a mad burnout. It would have been an epic advertisement.
I always thought this was a great advert for Lexus.
“Our cars are so durable that only the top 12 toughest people on earth can harm them, and not even all of them can actually do it”
Huh, I always thought this was an Honda/Acura Vigor.
“…smash the everloving clamnuts out of this helpless luxury sedan… -JT
Mr. Torchinsky , you are an amazing writer with a wicked turn of phrase.
However, I’m starting to worry about all the clam references. What’s going on in CERN that we all need to be worried about? Have they somehow created a rift in spacetime that allowed intergalactic clams through and now they are set to become our bivalve overlords? Or do they just want us to go back to engines that have two valves per cylinder (AKA bivalve engines)?
CERN? You mean the Clam Energy Research Network? I hear they’re doing one shell of a job innovating clam-based energy sources. It’ll give “clam-bake” a whole new meaning!
How about the JDM sedan parked at the gas station that gets destroyed in a Final Fight bonus level?
Sure, you’re a no-good punk besieging the city, but to come out from buying a soda and find your car destroyed by either the former pro wrestler mayor or his karate expert buddies, that hurts.
“Oh…my god!”
I always thought the guy said “Oh…my car!”
I don’t know cars in GTA can be abused to hell and back. You literally can have everything ripped off from all the damage and the car barely being able to limp back to the auto shop to have it back on beautiful condition just to be beat to hell once again. It is like ground hog day for a car haha.
Torch, I think you’re the man to ask.
Can I interface my USB fight stick through the OBD2 port in my car?
No, the data lines on OBD2 are all CAN, LIN, or K-Line. While USB to CAN transceivers exist, they would need a whole lot of logic to translate the output of your flight stick to CAN commands. There is a Python CAN library you could run on a Raspberry Pi as the middleman to translate stick commands to CAN, but you’ll need the specific Arbitration IDs for the functions you want the stick to replicate.
I don’t know if this is real knowledge or tongue-in-cheek gibberish, but either way, I’m impressed.
I don’t know OBD2 protocols precisely, but it is completely accurate guide for nearly any computer protocol interface. The one thing I’d add is the Pi route, while maybe the most end user friendly, will have significant input lag. The joystick is already using an embedded controller that is taking analog and digital sensor positions and translating it to USB human interface device commands. USB HID is already notoriously input laggy (to be fair, a lot of this is on the operating system side) and adding what is more or less software emulation will make it worse. Far better to take an AVR, like a teensy, connect the sensors/buttons and program an embedded device to output the correct commands.
For CSRoad, the people you want to talk to are adaptive vehicle techs that modify vehicles for people who need different interfaces for cars. They know how to do what you want, and are awesome people who often are really creative as.their clients will all have some unique needs. But while they have the info, it’s unlikely to be legal for you.
Depending on the vehicle, the Comma.ai interface may be an option as well, yes the Pi will add significant lag, please don’t try to drive your car this way. There is a video floating around on YouTube of someone driving their car with the motion sensors of their Smart Phone, in that case they hijacked the lane keep and adaptive cruise (this is all from memory) to control vehicle steering and throttle.
I’m not an IT person at all, so this is just me nodding and smiling politely.
I’ve actually built a POC of this at 1/10th scale. It’s kludgy AF, but doable.
Thanks for the info.
So my dreams of joystick and button control are well beyond Plug&Play.
I figured with ABS, throttle by wire and electric power steering it would be possible. Full Stick Driving with just a few relays and solenoids.
Sounds like too much for me to handle.
That car in the parking lot that never moves, there’s a full size skeleton under the dash.
Really you want a car with some form of drive and steer by wire, preferably with lane keep assist/self parking; because then the required interfaces are already in place to tap into, it’s just a programming/reverse engineering exercise at that point, VS adding additional controls to the vehicle.
Why does the smashed car have a DOHC il-6 with a big turbo? This wasn’t a regular LS400. Somebody must have swapped the V8 for a 7M-GTE.
Street fighter II was released in 1987. The “F1 project” was well known in Japan, but they would have only seen concept art and drawings during development. So they had to make it up for the details.
Edit: I remembered dates wrong. 87 was the OG, and II was 91, so disregard…
That’ll teach you to park on the curb, Matt Farah!
I like how the logo was changed just enough to avoid legal issues. The new Vexus LS400… or maybe the Vexus LS401 just in case.
It almost looks like an inverted Acura logo.