Traffic Simulator 2025

Beat traffic as you weave, shove, and blast your way through the five stages of grief in this retro "racing" game.

Beat traffic as you weave, shove, and blast your way through the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) in this retro "racing" game.

Play the game! (requires mouse and keyboard or game controller)

With an absurd title like “Traffic Simulator 2025” you may have guessed that this is an “anti-game”, a genre I wrote about in my previous article.

The traffic isn’t scripted, it’s all algorithmically generated!

Each car has its own desired rate at which it accelerates and decelerates, min and max distances to keep from the car in front of it, and lookahead which determines how its speed is adjusted each frame… with simulated human error that leans on the side of going too fast. After tweaking these variables, it was funny to see traffic forming naturally between these pixel art vehicles.

You can view the open source code, though note that I wrote it in ~4 days so it’s not exemplary.

Spoilers ahead…

Everyone that’s ever driven a car has daydreamed about beating traffic. Thus, many games with driving mechanics are designed in part to fulfill that desire. For example in GTA V, lane spacing is super wide, making it easy to weave through traffic at high speeds.

By upgrading the player’s station wagon to an F1 racecar in the beginning of “Traffic Simulator 2025”, I give the illusion that this game will provide wish fulfillment in a similarly straightforward way. But after letting the player experience highway speeds, they get stuck in gridlock.

“If only there was one more lane” is exactly what auto-makers want people to think, but more lanes just make a highway more appealing to drive on, eventually leading to even worse traffic.

The real solution? High-speed trains!

Play the game! (requires mouse and keyboard or game controller)