Retro Racing: how to play and how scoring works

How long a round lasts

A 60-second driving clock that starts only after a 3-2-1-GO countdown, so the countdown costs you nothing. The run ends early on a single crash — there are no lives and no damage meter. Afterwards the page returns you to the site automatically.

Controls

Up or W to accelerate, Down or S to brake, Left/Right or A/D to steer. There is no pause and no restart key.

On a touch device, four on-screen buttons appear: accelerate and brake on the bottom left, steering on the bottom right.

Steering is proportional to speed — the faster you go, the more ground a held steering input covers. Keyboard and touch inputs are all-or-nothing; only a connected gamepad gives partial throttle, braking or steering.

How scoring works

There is exactly one way to score: cover distance. Overtaking earns nothing on its own, there is no lap bonus, no time bonus and no combo. Since distance per second is a direct function of speed, score is speed.

The first 30 seconds are capped

Your maximum speed is not fixed. It begins at 40% of top speed and ramps steadily to 100% over the first 30 seconds, then stays there for the rest of the run. In HUD terms that is 50 mph rising to 120 mph.

Because score accrues in proportion to speed, the second half of a clean run is worth far more than the first. Surviving to the 30-second mark is the whole game — a crash at 25 seconds costs you the entire high-value stretch, not just the seconds remaining.

Traffic itself never gets harder. Every car is placed once at the start of the run with a speed it keeps throughout; there is no escalation, no rubber-banding and no extra spawns. What changes is only how fast you are moving through it.

You can only crash into cars you are overtaking

The collision test for traffic only runs when you are travelling faster than the car beside you. A car that is outrunning you cannot hit you, even if you are touching it.

This inverts the usual instinct. Braking sharply behind slower traffic is not just costly in score — it is unnecessary. What you must avoid is arriving alongside a slow car at high speed with nowhere to go.

Roadside objects work differently: trees, billboards and boulders can only hit you while your car's centre is off the tarmac. Clip scenery while you remain on the road and nothing happens.

Going off-road is survivable; cornering too fast is not

Leaving the road applies a heavy deceleration, but only while you are above roughly a quarter of top speed, and it fights against your acceleration rather than stopping you. If you keep the throttle held, you settle into a slow crawl rather than a halt — so a wheel off the edge is a score problem, not usually a fatal one.

Cornering is the real limit. Your steering rate scales with speed, but the force pushing you outward through a curve scales with speed twice over. Past a certain speed no amount of steering holds a hard curve, and the car leaves the road regardless of input. That threshold is a property of the corner, not of your reflexes.

The track is rebuilt by a procedural generator each time the page loads, then loops. It is biased against repetition — a left-hand curve makes another left less likely next — so you cannot learn one layout, but you can rely on curves alternating more often than not.

What actually raises your score

• →Survive the first 30 seconds. Your speed cap doubles over that stretch, and the back half is where the score is.
• →Do not brake for traffic ahead of you — you cannot crash into a car that is faster than you are.
• →Slow down for corners, not for cars. Cornering force grows with the square of speed, so a hard curve has a hard limit.
• →If you go off the road, keep the throttle down. The penalty tapers and you recover much faster than by lifting off.
• →Weave on the straights only. Scenery cannot touch you while you are on the tarmac, so the road is always the safer line.
• →Remember there is no overtaking bonus — passing a car is only worth the speed you kept while doing it.