Games You Forgot About: ‘Kinetica’ (2001)
Kinetica is a racing game that was forgotten about nearly as soon as it was released in 2001. It was buried in the market by giant industry racers like Gran Turismo 3: A Spec and ATV Offroad Fury. In fact, the most likely reason you’ve heard of Kinetica – if you’ve heard about it at all – is because of the game engines named after the game that would later inspire the wildly popular God of War series. Reviewers weren’t terribly kind to it either, criticizing the game as inventive but flawed. Issues like poor frame rate, inconsistent level design, and artificial gameplay elements are the common reasons that then-reviewers cited as reasons for dismissing Kinetica. Kinetica was thus condemned to obscurity.
After replaying the game in 2017 and tracing through its critical and journalistic history, however, I want to suggest that Kinetica deserves a second pass. On the surface, the game adopts simple futuristic theme with multiple courses, quasi-cyborg characters, and enough game modes to keep the Playstation 2 player (and their friends) happy. Kinetica is fast paced but repetitive. It’s flashy but surface level, as far as many players have written. But I think that this game, if taken up in a contemporary context, with a console that is 43 times faster than the console that Kinetica originated on, then this game’s problems would largely resolve. Kinetica might become like the 2001 space odyssey that it aimed to become.
Kinetica marketed itself as an edgy, Post-90s, futuristic racing game with techno music and flashy level design. Once inside the game, however, it becomes clear that Kinetica is actually a dystopian dimension of the future, not a grandiose glimpse into moral and technological progress. One might imagine the game’s scenario not altogether out of place in a Black Mirror episode: characters are trapped in technological bodysuits in which they must race – often to the death – for the sheer entertainment of a largely implied audience.
The game disrespects physics in a way that would ravage any human body – especially the women, barely clothed by their scant and seemingly unsupportive armor. The game’s limited cast suggests a hauntingly grim, limited and hyper-surveilled characters, none of which ever feel properly “human.” Again, this cast feels as though they’re in some Hunger Games-esque public display of olympic feats – with absurd consequences. Even the substructure of Kinetica’s implicit world (i.e. the crowds to which these races are presumably being projected) struggles to assign the game’s otherwise linear plot to the world within the game. Or, that of what we might contemporarily recognize as reality television: a kind of hyper-absurdist take on life that satisfies and palliates the tribal and imbalanced natures of societies.
Kinetica’s troupe of characters is quite limited at the beginning of the game, harking the kind of diva sports culture that entitles sports teams with lofty ranks to opt out of first-round playoff matches – a time when such matches truly matter to a team’s success. Regardless of your character choice, the first venue of “session one” begins in the same place: Macropolis, what Ryan Davis (2001) rightly described as evoking a Blade Runner feel.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Kinetica, it is truly worth the time to spend some time looking through the level designs. The first “session” consists of four tracks: Macropolis, Lost City, Electrica, and Orbital Junction. Two further sessions will unlock an additional eight tracks, bringing the player to a grand total of twelve: Suicide Slide, New Vega, Electrica II, Cliffhanger, Gabriel’s Horn, Lost City II, Neocropolis, Metroscape, Emerald Eve, Electrica X, and Orbital Junction II. This is not a stellar myriad of available racing tracks, which is a design artifact of the time period in which this game was produced. More importantly than the game’s execution, the cohesiveness of the world that this game presents is a perfectly believable manifestation of a not-too-distant imagining of how biotechnics and futuristic transportation infrastructure find balance in a commoditized way, like sports.
Part of the edginess of Kinetica arises out of its character design. There’s an edginess – that is, cyberpunk or transhuman aspect – to these characters, one of the reasons why this game was awarded a “T” for teen rating by the helicopter parents of 2001 for “suggestive themes.” That’s just to say that the women racers show more skin than is arguably necessary, which, perhaps for pre-teens and younger might be too provocative. Furthermore, the aggressively masculine design of characters like Crank, for instance, reflect the kind of hyper-industrialized machinations that appeared in rated “M” games like Twisted Metal: Black (2001). Not exactly nightmare material, in this case. Kinetica’s ambitious futuristic premise is served best by its antiquated minimalism.
A weakness of Kinetica is, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, is its lack of cutscenes – or at least story. There’s never really a moment to “breathe.” There is almost nothing given in Kinetica. The player bears witness to a kind of emergent narrative, one like I’ve offered you here: dystopian. Regardless of the narrative, this game repackages a simple formula – racing – into a deeply memorable world. Racing might be one of the most fundamental kinds of gaming, but simplicity shouldn’t be confused with sameness.
It might be hard for the 2018 gamer to seek out an obscure arcade-style game from 2001 that never saw economic success. Without nostalgia, you might reasonably ask, what does this game still have to offer that hasn’t been done better since? One indication is found on the Speedrun page for Kinetica: two days prior to writing this in 2018, an American user named Nightbarrel has set a new record for completing all tracks in 46m 40s 880ms. In other words, people still care about this game almost two decades after its release.
Further, three weeks after drafting this article, one of my favorite gaming channels on YouTube (Continue?) uploaded a playthrough/review of Kinetica. Their enjoyable take can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDqaCwagZ4I
A final indication of this game’s worth is that Sony thought it economically worthwhile to rerelease on the Playstation Network in 2016, fresh in 1080p – which, for games of the 2001 PS2 era, is quite the upgrade. Both economic forces (Sony) and community (Speedruns) persist in keeping the distant (ironically futuristic) game, Kinetica, alive.
Developers should take this idea as inspiration and race away, back to the future with it.
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