Dial the nostalgia meter all the way back to the sixth console generation and try to remember the Nintendo GameCube’s best racing games. If you, like the better part of my college dorm, spent many a night taking racing go-karts with a plumber behind the wheel constantly hurling blue shells at the tie-wearing gorilla who is your nemesis, you’d be forgiven. Even today, the Mario Kart series is a system seller on Nintendo consoles. Mario Kart: Double Dash on the GameCube was certainly no exception.
But what if we told you that the Game Cube held, within its revered library of games, a realistic NASCAR simulator that critics described as having, “an unparalleled amount of depth?” NASCAR: Dirt to Daytona (2002) is that game.
Dirt to Daytona comes to us from developer Monster Games, who made NASCAR Heat for the PC, PlayStation, and notably on the GameBoy Color as well as its sequel, NASCAR Heat 2002. NASCAR: Dirt to Daytona sets itself apart from Monster Games’ previous racing titles by featuring several racing series including the Craftsman Truck Series, Featherlite Modified Tour, and the Dodge Weekly Racing Series.
The game also features more product placement than you can shake a yellow flag at with all the vehicles appearing just as you might expect them to look on cable back in 2002. When was the last time you played a racing game with a Kellogg’s-sponsored car inquiring if you’ve “got milk?”
Of course, some of the product placement had to be toned down to make Dirt to Daytona more kid-friendly. All references to tobacco and alcohol brands were scrubbed from the game and Mark Martin’s Viagra car was replaced with one that referenced the drug’s maker, Pfizer.
Corporate sponsorships from yesteryear are all fine and good, but it’s the sense of acceleration while threading the needle between the competition that makes Dirt to Daytona worth dusting off your old console to experience. As console racing sims go, this one’s got it where it counts. The graphics aren’t going to turn any modern heads, though they might have turned some low poly ones back at the turn of the millennium. But the cars are realistic enough and the cookie cutter stands provide a sense of grandeur appropriate for being at car level in some of NASCAR’s most famous tracks. The game’s emphasis on using draft to pull ahead of the competition and a handful of other touches like commentator Allen Bestwick welcoming you to the track before the race gets underway are enough to make you feel like you’re behind the wheel of a real stock car.
NASCAR: Dirt to Daytona won “Best Driving Game on the GameCube” in GameSpot’s Best and Worst of 2002 Awards. The PlayStation 2 version of the game was nominated, but just couldn’t pull ahead of Burnout 2: Point of Impact (2002). Dirt to Daytona did not receive a direct sequel, but developer Monster Games kept pumping out racing games first with an entry in the Test Drive series, Test Drive: Eve of Destruction (2004), and then a series of games in the Excite series for Nintendo including Excite Truck in 2006 and the excellent Excitebots: Trick Racing in 2009. Monster Games’ most recent racer, World of Outlaws Dirt Racing was released in 2002 for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Xbox One as well as the Xbox Series X/S.
