In the future, great speedways will crisscross the skies. Drivers in small, fast vehicles compete in dangerous races, roaring through the air at hundreds, even thousands of kilometers per hour.
This isn't the futuristic vision of one racing game, but of three: Kinetica, Extreme G3 and Ballistics, all released in the last couple of months.
With the old journalistic adage "two's a coincidence, three's a trend" in mind, you have to wonder exactly what, if anything this trend signifies for the future of gaming.
A while back I had seen a preview of SCEA's Kinetica, in which people wear racing suits with wheels attached to their hands and feet. Speeding along futuristic tracks at 565kph, racers can fly into the air and do spins and somersaults that give them speed boosts.
Though seemingly unaffected by gravity, cars can drive up or down roads set perpendicular to the earth and the effects of gravity.
Occasionally you might miss a jump and hurtle to the streets miles below. For all its futuristic trappings, Kinetica plays better on its earthbound tracks than on its aerial ones.
A few weeks later I had forgotten the name of the game, so when I received a futuristic racing game with a stylized XGIII on the front, I thought at first it must be the one I'd seen.
Instead, it was Acclaim's Extreme G3, in which you ride motorcycles that can reach 1,400kph and are equipped with heavy weaponry used to obliterate the competition.
Extreme G3 is a remarkably good-looking game. Its gorgeous skyways snake through snowy mountains, past Egyptian pyramids, under the roiling seas or above the streets of a rain-soaked metropolis, stretching out as though they could go on forever, giving the player a sense of freedom.
In Ballistics, yet another futuristic racing game, you pilot small craft that speed through long, windowed tube tracks running over Siberia and the Grand Canyon.
These tubes contain partial blockages that you must navigate past, and if you can consistently avoid them and hit speed-boosting pads, you can reach speeds of 6,400kph without the aid of psychotropic substances or even a time machine.
While I never came close to that, even at a measly 1,400kph the track passes by so quickly that it is seen as a series of flashing images that look like something out of a 1960s psychedelic light show.
Those moments are utterly exhilarating, and I cared less about winning the race than about getting that rush, wishing that Ballistics supplied one obstacle-free track so I could see what 6,400kph looks like.
The tracks are rather murky and indistinguishable, but at 6,400kph, you probably couldn't enjoy the scenery much anyway.
By now, I had played three deadly, futuristic racing games with small vehicles racing through long, serpentine tracks and had no idea what it meant.
At a loss, I sent e-mail to request the thoughts of those involved in developing the games.
I was disappointed by the empty hyperbolic boasting that came back from the staffers who gave us Kinetica and Extreme G3, but Ballistics' publisher, Xicat, sent back a wonderful, flippantly philosophical response from one of its project managers, David Halpern.
"I think with the explosion and rapid pace of technology in society," Halpern furtively wrote, "there is a feeling we as a people are racing into our future at breakneck speeds, thus the emergence of these futuristic racers," he wrote.
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