Hey, what's up everybody? My name is Nolan. From Past Gas by Donut Media, we are an automotive

history show. It's kind of like hand that garage with your friends listing them tell a great

story from automotive history. On our next episode of Past Gas, the year is 1870, and a

samurai has just started a trading operation in a Japan still coming to grips with the modern

world. Through hard work, ingenious engineering, and perhaps more than a little war profiteering,

that company would later grow to be Mitsubishi, one of the largest companies and one of the world's

largest economies. But how did sales plummet to just 15% of their peak in a few short years?

How did the company watch Volkswagen's dieselgate unfold and then top it? And is Mitsubishi responsible

for the trend of naming mid-size crossovers after once iconic performance models? All that and

more on this week's Past Gas as we learn about the rise and fall of Mitsubishi.

Gran Turismo, Need for Speed, and yes, Mario Kart. These aren't just some of the best-selling

racing video games of all time, they're some of the best-selling games, period. Today,

driving games are one of the staples genres of the video game industry, an economic galaif,

with twice the revenue of the film and music industries combined. The evolution of automotive

racing games mirrors that of automobiles themselves. Just like cars, the early history of racing games

is one of innovation, and just like cars, racing games have a colorful history of gimmicks and

classics, hits and flops. In the early days of racing games, you could drive any car you wanted,

as long as it was a white blob on a black screen. In 2020, game developers are racing up the far

slope of the uncanny valley, creating driving experiences nearly indistinguishable from the real thing.

Within the world of video games, it's often been the racing genre that pushes graphics

and physics further than ever before. So, how do we get from dots on a screen to the present day

photo-realistic racing systems? Who are the innovators and the dreamers of racing games?

...