Car and Driver showed us what Looking Glass Technologies would become

Car and Driver was the first full priced PC game I ever saved up for and bought with my own money. Was that a horrible decision and, three decades later, is it little more than a slightly cack-looking driving game?

Of course not. Join me on a road trip to the world of early 1993, where corporate mergers and bizarre input schemes combine to give us what is arguably the first Looking Glass game, depending on who has won the Wikipedia edit war over whether John Madden '93 should be considered Blue Sky Productions or Looking Glass Technologies this week.

Accuracy note: the high-resolution driving mode is in fact a 320x400 unchained VGA mode, not requiring an SVGA card. Somehow in over 20 years I'd never once noticed the lack of horizontal resolution in the external views compared to full-on SVGA in the magazine view. (For VGA-only users, the magazine is still displayed in high resolution, but dithered to 16 colours.)

Road map:

0:00 On reflection, that would have been a good place to stop
1:03 A better Club Drive?
2:27 A new developer enters the chat
3:48 Dog chaos occurs
4:28 Diegetic interfaces
4:57 Oh no, it's the dog again
5:19 Atmosphere and awful input devices
7:14 Surprisingly modern
8:40 Oh no, context time
10:15 I accept reality
11:28 The game I should have covered if I wanted views and that
12:27 Things move too fast
13:45 Choose slack
14:35 Happy little avenues
15:45 Caring about Car and Driver through the medium of Škodas

Some sound effects CC0 from Freesound
Some images public domain from Wikimedia Commons
Some stock video footage from Pexels
Saab Prometheus image (c) Saab Automobile AB
Magazine scans courtesy of the Internet Archive

Bonus fact: while somewhat forgotten now, C&D achieved excellent review scores in its day and topped PC Review's list of test driving games a few months after release. Admittedly, the competition was Test Drive 3 and the very-dated-by-that-point Test Drive 2.