California Speed

• Title — California Speed • Developer — Atari Games • Publisher — Atari Games (arcade) Midway (N64) • Producer — Mark Stephen Pierce Steve Ritchie • Programmer — Carl Ferreira • Composer — Kevin Quinn, Dave Zabriske, Chris Granner, John Paul, Joe Lyford, Gunnar Madsen, Rich Carle, Todd Modjesky (Arcade) Barry Leitch, Pablo Buitrago (N64) • Released — Arcade March 1998 Nintendo 64 March 18, 1999 • Genre — Racing • Modes — Single player, multiplayer • Platforms — Arcade, Nintendo 64 • Arcade System — Atari/Midway Seattle

California Speed has players race against other players and multiple computer-controlled opponents on point-to-point races set in many cities and rural areas across the state of California. Players can race with several different cars, with automatic or manual transmissions. Courses include "civilian" traffic and other hazards that must be avoided, and provide opportunity to perform stunts such as flips and wheelies. The gameplay has been compared to that of the contemporaneous Cruis'n series co-produced by Nintendo and Midway's Chicago studios. The arcade version allows up to four arcade cabinets to be linked together for four-player racing.

The game was exhibited at the January 1998 Amusement Trades Exhibition International in London and the February 1998 AOU Show in Tokyo.

In April 2012, a post was made to the r/creepygaming subreddit about two billboards discovered in the "Mojave Desert" level of the Nintendo 64 version of the game which bore black text on a white background displaying a strange message reading SoMETIMES... God TAkES MOMMIES ANd PuPPIES AWAY... ANd SoMETIMES... JuST SoMETIMES... I do The reason for the billboard message's inclusion was not known until February 2016, when the website PopOptiq published an article in which Morgan Godat, a textural artist for the game, explained that the game had been created under a serious time crunch, and the billboard used a placeholder texture that was inadvertently left in the final version.