The ten best console racing games of all time

Enlarge / It’s never a bad time to bust out your wheel—here’s the T-GT wheel. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Welcome to Ars Gaming Week 2019! As a staff full of gamers and game-lovers, we’ll be serving up extra reviews, guides, interviews, and other stories all about gaming from August 19 to August 23.

Have your gaming tastes changed as you age? Mine have. Back in the early days, before starting an accidental love affair with the car, I’d play anything. In fact, I don’t even remember my first racing game, although Outrun is probably a safe guess considering my age and where I grew up. But as I’ve gotten older and time for gaming has become scarce, that’s all gone, and I exist on a diet that’s almost exclusively racing. Console racing at that. Blame fear of having to learn something new if you like.

So when I was asked to write something for Ars Gaming Week, it seemed like a good opportunity to make a list—in this case, the ten best console racing games of all time. There is no scientific method behind my ranking. We did not assemble a crack panel of industry experts to stank-rank the field. I don’t have celebrity anecdotes. And if a particular game was on a platform I never had, it won’t be on the list, either.