Under the microscope: Andretti Racing & NASCAR Heat (Saturn, PlayStation)
Long lost Easter eggs in 32-bit racing games
In this edition, I’m examining two 32-bit racing games: Andretti Racing for Saturn and PlayStation and NASCAR Heat for PlayStation.
Both of these games have previously-undocumented Easter eggs that are activated by using special player names:
Andretti Racing on Saturn has eight hidden pictures. Some show the production staff and their family members. One shows a cartoon alien.
Andretti Racing on PlayStation has 33 hidden pictures, mostly of the production staff.
NASCAR Heat for PlayStation will show you eight members of the development staff Photoshopped into a racing suit if you enter certain aliases.
Details are below!
Andretti Racing
It’s well-known that this game uses special names for cheat effects. For example, you can unlock extra cars with special names:
GO BEARS! enables all of the stock cars
GO BRUINS! enables all of the Indy cars
PRESSSTART enables the “Press Start” car (on the Saturn version)
The Saturn version has a few additional cheat effects: (1) the name WYRED turns on wireframe mode, and (2) the name PHATCARS makes all of the cars wider.
The Saturn-exclusive names get checked by the function at 0605b170 (NTSC-U version). The code does this:
Compares your player name to
PHATCARSCompares your player name to
WYREDCompares your player name to
PRESSTART
That checks out, but then the game loops through eight more names:
0608216c "MARCO"
0608217a "GARY T"
06082188 "G S"
06082196 "DAVE K"
060821a4 "ALIEN"
060821b2 "WENDY STEIN"
060821c0 "ERIC CORTEZ"
060821ce "HOWIE RIDER"What do those do? It took me a while to figure it out, but what they do is alter the Starting grid screen that appears before a race starts. Normally it shows your player name next to a driver in a racing helmet:
But when you use one of the special names you get a different pictures:
Presumably most of these people worked on the game, but it’s hard to locate them in the credits. Wendy Stein is listed on Mobygames as being on the Art team.
The Marco name has a picture of a young child. One of the developer’s kids, maybe? I’ll omit the picture, although this person is probably 40 by now. The Alien name gives you a picture of a cartoon alien:
The PlayStation version has a different list of special names – 33 of them:
| SERGIO LOBATO | ROBERT JONES | RICHARD LUI |
| KEN CHAO | MIKE WILLIAMS | WILL BUNNETT |
| JOHN CHUI | M GARDINER | TAYLOR LARSEN |
| MARK FONG | PAM SEAWELL | FRANK PAO |
| JAY DAVIS | HAPPY KELLER | KEITH AU |
| BILL BOYER | RICH ROGERS | MARK KWONG |
| AION CHUI | KENNY ROGERS | PAUL CHANG |
| AMANDA NAVA | MATT MCKNIGHT | CORI LARSEN |
| T FITZGERALD | RANDY BEVERLY | WILL BECKMAN |
| BRIAN JACKSON | SHAWN JACOBY | YVONNE HAMLET |
| BRIAN REED | JORDAN LARSEN | ERIC NAVA |Some of them are also identifiable in the game credits, like Jim Larsen and Sergio Lobato:
Others are more obscure:
If you’re in contact with anybody who worked on this game, send them this article! I’d love to know about how this set of Easter eggs came to be. Did someone walk around the office asking for pictures to use?
NASCAR Heat
Hmm, are there any other racing games that have special name-based Easter eggs?
Yes! NASCAR Heat, the 2000 PlayStation game from Digital Illusions. It checks the whether the name you enter matches one of these eight, which are stored starting at 8007ec08:
| Rob Dice | Nicho Dice |
| Joc Dice | Offa Dice |
| Olle Dice | Axl Dice |
| Mange Dice | Jeep Dice |If there’s a hit, an extra entry will be added to the list of drivers.
All of these bonus drivers race in a special DICE car:
Based on the game credits, Rob is probably Robert Runesson; Nicho is Nicholas Nolby; Joc is Joacim Lindquist; and Axl is Andreas Axelsson. I’m not sure about the rest, but leave a comment if you know.
Outro
For more fun Easter eggs from the development staff, see the articles about:
I’ll be back with another one later this week!
Interesting finds! Andretti Racing was a good game along with Cart World Series on the PSX too for F1 racers.