Turbo Esprit Amstrad CPC

An armoured supply car is carrying drugs to the centre of the city. One after the other, four delivery cars will drive in to meet it, and then drive off to their hide-aways. After the forth pick-up the armoured supply car will leave the city. Your mission is to stop the delivery cars after they have made their pick-ups and before they disappear in their hide-aways, and to stop the armoured supply car after it has passed its drugs to the last car and before it leaves the city.

You will score extra points for catching the drug smugglers alive, rather than shooting them. Your vehicle will be a Lotus Turbo Esprit capable of driving at 150mph. You will lose points for injuring the general public. There are traffic lights at junctions which should be obeyed (though the smugglers will probably ignore them), there are pedestrian crossings and there are road-works that you should avoid. Drive well. Drive carefully. — Cassette cover

Turbo Esprit is a video game published by Durell Software in 1986 for the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC. The game was very detailed and advanced for its time, featuring car indicator lights, pedestrians, traffic lights, and a view of the car's interior controls. It may also be the earliest example of a free-roaming city environment to feature in a computer game. Turbo Esprit was the first free-roaming driving game, and has been cited as a major influence on the later Grand Theft Auto series.

Gameplay

The object of the game is to prevent a gang of drug smugglers completing a delivery of heroin, by tracking down their cars and destroying them, or ramming them into submission. The player takes the role of a special agent driving the titular Lotus Esprit car, which had been used in a James Bond film a few years previously. The player must travel around one of four available cities looking for the criminals. Messages from HQ will flash up periodically giving the location of a target car, which may then be tracked on the map.

Once the target car is found it must be either destroyed with the Esprit's built-in machine gun, or repeatedly rammed until it surrenders. Different cars may need to be dealt with in different ways; for example armoured cars must be rammed as shooting has no effect, whereas "hit cars" are the only other vehicles that can match the Esprit for speed, so ramming them is more difficult.

Penalties are incurred for hitting scenery or other cars, and the player's car is likely to explode if it crashes into anything while travelling fast. As in real life, speeding greatly increases risk.

According to author Mike Richardson, Turbo Esprit took 10 months to develop, the longest time he ever spent on a single game. It was developed with the cooperation of Lotus Cars Ltd., who provided "technical assistance"

Source:Wikipedia